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Long-term tech strategy: Advice from a Chief Digital Officer
In this episode, Bob Howland lays down your keys to success as a Chief Digital Officer. For his most recent success, Dawn Foods, Bob sketched out his ideal eCommerce architecture - which was a "composable commerce" stack before that term even existed - and built it in just 22 weeks (which was ahead of time & on budget). This is a massive enterprise transformation - Dawn Foods is a 4,000 people company, and prior to Bob, they had zero eCommerce infrastructure or expertise. Less than 6 months to a fully self-service eCommerce experience from scratch? Yup. And it doesn't stop there. Listen to find out Bob's top 5 lessons for CDOs.
Timestamps:
- 0:11 Intro & Dawn Foods story
- 2:08 Lesson 1: How to buy technology
- 5:13 Why Bob allocated more dev hours to post-launch than pre-launch
- 5:55 Taking internal opinions with a grain of salt
- 7:23 Handling the quality, cost, time, triangle
- 8:20 How Dawn Foods collects customer data (Voice of Customer)
- 9:30 Lesson 2: How to allocate your time
- 11:15 "But we're doing just fine" - pushing for change when you're already market leader
- 12:25 Lesson 3: How Bob gains credibility in the first 30 days in any company (30 doughnuts in 60 days)
- 14:56 Lesson 4: The importance of "disproof"
- 16:44 How to avoid offending people when you point out what needs to change - and get them to help you instead
- 20:53 Lesson 5: How (and why) to play the long game when it comes to transformation
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