Lessons learned from 10 years at Sitecore

A decade at Sitecore, it seems like such a milestone nowadays. Back in my father’s day, people stayed with companies for their entire work lives, and indeed, he worked for the same company for 32 years.  But the world has changed, and 10 years is the exception, not the rule. After 10 years helping drive change and innovation at Sitecore, it’s time for me to move in a new direction. 

Over the last 10 years, we’ve accomplished amazing things at Sitecore. From disrupting the WCM market with the Online Marketing Suite, to rethinking commerce to revolve around customer experience, it’s been an amazing professional experience.  I’d like to share my top 5 lessons learned from my decade at Sitecore.

Lesson 1: Be fearless to dream. Don’t let experts tell you what cannot be done. Do the impossible anyway. It reminds me of that great quote I’m sure you’ve seen that says “People Who Say It Cannot Be Done Should Not Interrupt Those Who Are Doing It”. When we first starting to pull multiple marketing technologies into one cohesive platform, I had analysts, industry experts and everyone else telling me no one wanted that, and it could not be done. Years later, those same analysts and experts told me the integrated platform was now the new normal. Moral of the story, dream big and don’t let the naysayers stop you. As Daniel Burnham said “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's [and women’s] blood

Lesson 2: Think outside in. Years ago, I attended a pragmatic marketing class that changed the way I thought about designing products. It seems so obvious when it hit me. Stop building products, and start to solve customer problems. My other favorite line from that class was NIEHITO which stands for Nothing Important Ever Happens In The Office, so get out and spend time with your customers in their office, using your products, and doing their jobs. It profoundly changed how I looked at product design and requirements development. Years later, Ryan Donovan introduced me to Scenario Focused Engineering, and it all came together. Moral of the story is see the world through your customers eyes, and solve their problems by looking over their shoulder as they use your products.

Lesson 3: Leadership is about vision and painting the art of the possible. Creating a shared vision amongst your team, and creating something greater than just the job is a powerful mechanic. I’ve always loved having a mission instead of just a job, and creating the emotional connection with your team on how you are going to change the world inspires and gets teams to dig deep. Over the years at Sitecore, I had the privilege to lead some amazing teams that pulled off stunning results. This had everything to do with their belief in what we were doing, and how they were making a difference. Moral of the story is don’t be afraid of emotional leadership. Use it to create high performing teams that love what they do.

Lesson 4: Finding blue oceans, skating to where the puck is going and how to use social. We all want to create that next breakout product, and if we’re thinking outside in, we’re solve that next latent customer problem, but it can be a challenging thing to discover. It takes lots of legwork, and time talking to customers, partners and industry analysts. One of the things that helped propel my success at Sitecore was building a powerful industry analyst function that was both outbound and inbound. So often, people think you can just throw money at analysts and you get great placement, but it doesn’t work that way. I’ve blogged extensively about his over the years, but the secret is to listen to analysts, find the trends they think are important, and find ways to weave that into your products and strategy. Then, using that, go back to those same analysts and show them how they’ve influenced you. That is one of the most powerful tools in the AR arsenal, though few use it well. The other underused tool is social. We’re all so fixated on outbound messaging on social, we forget it’s a wonderful tool to immerse in to listen to what your customers and partners are talking about. It’s like walking the shop floor in a plant, listening to watercooler conversation. You can get amazing insights if you listen, and actual ask questions and converse with your customers on places like LinkedIn and Twitter. Moral of the story is to influence, you must be willing to be influenced.

Lesson 5: Innovation, balance and not forgetting the bottom of the pyramid. One of the hallmarks of Sitecore’s success was its relentless pace of innovation. It drove our competitors crazy. It was also a balancing act of investing equally into things customers were asking for, things sales needed to compete, and that next new innovative feature customers didn’t realize they needed yet. Achieving balance on these is tough to do. It’s so temping to just focus on one area, but it’s important to blend them all. If you are taking an outside in approach, then you are going beyond feature creation to a full story or scenario that can tie multiple requests together. One common mistake I’ve seen over the years though it to look at the whole problem and not just one part of it. I call it the pyramid problem. Technologist love solving the tricky top part of a problem, and get bored solving the mundane, commodity parts of a customer problem. While doing the former will lead to sales, lacking the later will kill adoption.  Moral of the story is to solve the entire problem, not just the cool bits.

So that’s a quick tour of the lessons learned from a decade at Sitecore. What’s next for me you ask? After some downtime, I’ll be back at it, looking for that next industry to disrupt. I’ll be spending the summer looking at what’s that next customer problem to solve, and what market needs some rethinking. I’ll also be writing a bit more, and expanding on some of these lessons learned if there’s interest. Thanks again to the amazing team at Sitecore for 10 wonderful years and the amazing professional growth it’s given me. I leave you all now with this parting gem...