Digital teams are going rogue
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) show us how good or bad our strategy is. Poor KPIs are an indication that strategy and digital/execution teams aren’t communicating.
In an online comment a few weeks back a former colleague commented that ‘reach’ is a nonsensical key performance indicator.
It’s hard to disagree, but what if the KPI is only a symptom of something else: the quality of the strategy or failed communication between teams?
What if ‘reach’ makes total sense as a response if the strategy is ‘attention’ (which is a tactic, not a strategy), and that it’s not the KPI that needs fixing but something else.
Strategies serve a dual purpose:
1. It’s a set of decisions made in order to win. It articulates how the strategy owner sees their market and how they will influence it in order to achieve their desired outcomes. Strategy is discussed upstream in the organization to get the support and resources necessary.
2. But strategy is also used downstream. It’s a map, a guide, a set of instructions for the execution and / or digital teams to build their execution on.
Vague or imprecise strategies don’t give execution teams anything to work on. It’s a set of generalizations where everything is a good answer.
Vague strategy means a set of generalizations where any execution becomes a good answer.
And so this often happens: having to build something on top of bad strategy leaves the execution team with no direction which they resolve by retracting to what they know best and how they are measured themselves ( usually engagement).
.. If we don’t know what we are doing, at least we’ll get our customers to spend time with us doing it..
This leads to a clear gap between what the strategy team wanted and what the execution team is building. To paraphrase another former colleague:
“we are measured on engagement, so we build for engagement, we don’t measure the strategy som we’re not building for it”
The impression within the strategy team is that the digital teams are going rogue, but are they?
This is where we get to failure of communication. Because the digital teams looking at the strategy can clearly see that the strategy gives them no guidelines, so why don’t they reach out to the strategy team and explain what they need in order to build stuff that works?
But they don’t.
They retract to how they are measured (engagement) and they build webinars because they produce the most engagement (with no reference to either the strategy or value to the customer).
Poor KPI’s are not good or bad, but a symptom of:
- The strategy being bad
- Digital and strategy teams not communicating
- Digital teams making stuff based on how they are measured not what brings value to the company
Strategy is too often viewed exclusively from an upstream perspective, but we also need to see it from the downstream perspective.
Digital teams and strategy teams need to meet, talk, share language and understand each other. Execution teams are excellent weather gauges on the quality and realism of the strategy. Only when we work better together we get fewer nonsensical KPIs.
