Is This the Right Tool for the Job?
Tech companies of every size and scale are continually bombarded with tools promising increased efficiency and optimized growth. The quest for the perfect tech stack can be daunting, and when it comes to data, precision is everything.
- Choose your technology wisely: Selecting the right tool is about more than cost and functionality; it's about alignment with long-term goals and impact
- Proper tech architecture involves thoughtful planning and understanding the "why" behind tool integration
- Trust in data is as significant as financial trust; businesses must place a high value on data quality and appoint stewards to ensure its integrity
Choosing Technology: Beyond Convenience and Cost
When considering new tools and applications for your company, it's essential to move beyond superficial metrics like cost-saving and user-friendliness. This is the importance of evaluating whether a tool aligns with the company's broader vision and objectives. Here’s what tech advisor and strategist Kurt Dusek has to say about this:
"So that's going to be where, again, going back to the vision, what is our product vision? What does our architecture tell us? What is our plan?"
One way you can do this is to focus on the long-term implications of a tool. But it isn't simply about immediate gain… Founders must also consider the impact on the company's trajectory and ensure that the integration of new technology serves as a stepping stone towards the ultimate vision.
Understanding and committing to the "why" behind a tool's adoption can mean resisting the allure of the latest trends and instead committing to the ones that add real, measurable value and growth potential.
Tech Architecture and Lifecycle Planning
In addressing the architectural side of technology in businesses, founders should assume a proactive versus reactive approach. Kurt Dusek again on strategizing for this process:
"Having leadership around technology just becomes fundamental. WordPress is only going to get you so far. Outsourcing everything is only going to get you so far."
Leadership is a crucial piece of every successful growth strategy, not simply guiding present operations but in predicting future needs. A technology leader must forecast potential growth points and prepare for transitions. Kurt Dusek believes building a successful data workflow is the key here:
"What are the big objectives? What are the big challenges we want to address? Certainly that has to be done. But with data, you have to kind of work small to big because the data is just a collection of individual rows."
A tech strategist can anticipate when the "good enough for now" tools will hit their limits — aligning tech tool lifecycles with business lifecycles is essential for sustainable scaling.
Trusting Data Like Dollars: The Need for a Chief Data Officer
Trust in data can make or break a company's success. If data is indeed as important as finances — which it most certainly is — then it's logical to have leadership dedicated to data's accuracy and utility. Here’s how Kurt frames this concern:
"If you consider data to be important as a form of value in your company, then there's got to be somebody who is the steward of that data."
In the same way a CFO oversees and validates a company's finances, a Chief Data Officer (CDO) can ensure that every bit of data collected and analyzed can be fully trusted and utilized for decision-making. By developing roles like the CDO, companies can bring the same rigor and responsibility to the data that they do to their financials to drive further growth.
Your Brand is Your Business
When you do it right, the fusion of brand and performance thrives to drive substantial growth in your business. As marketing veteran Ryan Maloney tells Matt Widdoes on the Growth@Scale podcast, there are three major factors that determine your company’s ability to scale as you develop your marketing strategy:
- Maintaining a unified brand and performance strategy is essential to your marketing success and growth
- Understanding customer needs and product-market fit should serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy
- Finding and following your North Star - Having a unified shared vision across all company departments to ensure aligned growth initiatives.
Intersection of Brand and Performance
Brand: It’s Not Just Marketing’s Responsibility - Brand strategy is at the very core of any successful company’s growth strategy. Once you can erase the traditional dichotomy of 'brand vs. performance', you can maintain a singular marketing unit to fortify the holistic growth of your brand.
The Role of Organizational Design - By eliminating departmental silos and encouraging an enterprise-wide appreciation for the overarching brand narrative, you will discover a more cohesive growth trajectory to scale.
The ‘Brand and Performance’ Coexistence Model - There must be a harmonious relationship between your brand and performance. It should be brand AND performance, not brand OR performance. Establish an ecosystem where both entities work symbiotically towards common growth goals.
Customer Centricity = Key to Growth
Understanding Your Audience - It all starts with a strong product and a thorough comprehension of your target customers. This knowledge isn't just for marketing machinations; it's a cornerstone philosophy that should permeate every touchpoint of the organization—from product development to post-sales service.
Customer Dialogue - It’s not sufficient to predict customer needs based on data alone; actual interactions provide greater insights and validation. An open customer dialogue reiterates the importance of maintaining open channels between your customers and you.
Customer Feedback for Product Refinement - Whether through product feedback, CRM initiatives, or other methodologies, using customer interaction to refine and align products to market needs is integral to the continuous improvement of the product's market fit and company growth.
Align Your Messaging for Sustainable Growth
Setting a Clear Vision Across Your Organization - Well-defined positioning creates a framework for decision-making and prioritization within your company, which can ensure heightened efficiency and prevention from misaligned initiatives.
Bottom-Up Feedback within Your Framework - Not only must you conduct a top-down approach to communication of objectives and strategic goals, but you must also have a mechanism for feedback from the ground up.
Alignment As You Scale - Internal alignment becomes increasingly challenging as your organization scales. That’s why finding your North Star, one that can engage cross-functional teams and incentivize them based on shared objectives, to ensure that even when incremental adjustments are made, your fundamental growth trajectory remains steady.
For more awesome content about how to achieve growth and performance marketing success don’t forget to follow, like, rate, and subscribe to the Growth@Scale podcast!