How to prep for a website redesign project.

I’ve seen the pain that comes from not having a clear view to the challenges, goals and success metrics. From not knowing the benchmarks. Not having a clear vision. Not having clear alignment across the teams.

This guide captures what I’ve learned over the last 18+ years as a marketing leader and consultant for a variety of B2B and B2C clients. I’ve led several dozen client projects to build, rebuild or optimize their websites. That’s a ton of reps at something most brand side clients may directly experience 1-2x in a career, if at all. 

I want to show you what’s necessary to be 100% prepared going into a partner selection process, or getting your own internal web team aligned.

Simply put, this will ensure you show up prepared from the start.

This is an outline of the guide.

  1. Introduction
  2. Why this guide? 
  3. How to use it
  4. Purpose + Motivations
  5. Why Now? 
  6. Goals + Objectives
  7. Scoping Details
  8. Practical Scoping Details
  9. Timing + Budget
  10. Other Considerations
  11. Reference Materials
  12. Stakeholder Alignment
  13. Project Leaders
  14. Project Influencers
  15. Practical Audit
  16. Performance Data
  17. Site Inventory
  18. Performance Review
  19. Audience + Experience
  20. Core Problems

Go here to download the guide while it’s free.

Why is data strategy to product management?

This is most of a reply I posted on Reddit the other day.

The OP was asking about the importance of data and analytics to PMs and product management as a whole.

In recent client engagements I’m seeing that PMs are overly reliant in simple 3P tracking tools like GA or MixPanel, which only give you a fraction of the available data.

They’re totally missing opportunities around zero and first party data.

As an example, think of a link sharing tool like Bitly.

From the outside you’re able to see this data:

  1. Link URL
  2. Link Origination Data
  3. # of clicks

This is pretty much what you would expect from just looking at data from a 3P tool like GA, right?

But you’re missing out on a TON of extra data that can be used for insights, planning and growth across product, marketing, sales, CX and more.

So, what should we look for?

It has to start at the brief with the PM setting the end to end vision for what data will be thrown off via user engagement and transactions.

If you think through the end to end link sharing experience, let’s look at all the other data that could be available for the business, and possibly the users.

A. Link Creator

  1. Profile Data: name, location, personal or professional account, profession, role, company, time since last log-in, time since last link creation, # of links created, # of referrals made, # of people engaging with the links and more.
  2. Membership Types: paid or free? personal or professional? Single or team member?

B. Link Creation

  1. Date Created
  2. Location: IP, region, country, state/city/DMA
  3. Device: mobile vs desktop, browser type
  4. App or Browser based?
  5. Uploaded Content Type(based on file type), File Size

C. Link Sharing/Distribution

Where: email, sms, other platforms, geos?
When: time of day/month, time from creation to distribution

D. Link Receivers

  1. Geo/Locations
  2. Receiving/Engaged Platform # of clicks/engagements
  3. Reshares?
  4. Existing Member/Customer: free or paid? single or professional
  5. Unknown/Prospect Cookied/Tracked?
  6. Matched to 3P Platforms like FB, GOOG, LR, etc?

All of this is actionable zero and first party data that can be used to build a richer customer profile, audience value, organic growth targeting and forecasting, net new customer acquisition funnels, product usage/value insights and a ton more.

To make this a reality, PMs need to define this with the data and ENG teams to make sure the data is captured and stored in a manner and place it’s accessible to other teams like growth/marketing, sales, CX and finance can better leverage it.