Be like an octopus: Why your team structure could be killing your website conversion rates
Tags: Management, Software Development, Analytics, Marketing

Be like an octopus: Why your team structure could be killing your website conversion rates

Octopuses have evolved so their legs can work independently but when it wants them to co-operate, a central brain takes charge. Here’s why that approach is the best way to get your company’s teams boosting your conversion rates…

This guy is judging you for your disorganized teams. Those legs convert crabs and scallops constantly.

Silos are good for sewage and missiles but in businesses they’re a nightmare: a huge suck on time and resources.

It’s all too easy for your executive team and a delusion* of creatives to develop a mission statement for your business but like most military strategies, it’s unlikely to remain in place once the first shot is fired.

This may sound familiar to you:

Your business has lots of teams, all of them with their own leaders, stars, problems and targets. Some of them even refer to their teams as “our guys” versus the people you work with who are “the other guys” or “them.”

Silos suck if you’re trying to fix conversion rates

“Hey! Hey! Listen, I don’t even know what silos are but they sound rubbish.”

In the world of website optimization, this silo effect is a killer. Of course, it makes sense from a logistical and resource perspective to break things up into projects and to assign different teams to focus on specific areas of your site. But — and it’s a ‘but’ so large that Sir Mix-a-lot could write a song about it — that can cause serious issues.

When you’ve got a team whose focus is product pages, another that has its heads tilted towards the homepage and a third that only cares about the checkout, you’ll soon find clashes in terms of priorities start happening. Who gets to call on the analyst, engineering and design resources most? Whose team is the most ‘important’?

The truth — rapidly buried under an avalanche of meetings, discussions and outright arse covering — is that the entire picture is important. Checkout is obviously key but homepage is going to sell your initial message and product pages provide the impetus to get to the checkout in the first place. Each part of the customer journey has a value — if it didn’t, you’d get rid of it, right?

At SessionCam, we’ve implemented a scrum team system in engineering, allowing our teams to more quickly design, build, iterate and improve new features. But those color-coded teams work closely with product architects , our Head of Engineering and the Chief Product Officer to keep the overall goals for improving and enhancing SessionCam in mind and in focus.

Your teams should be like an octopus… no, really.

“Yes, I’ve got an octopus on my head. It’s a ‘look’. They’re all doing it in Paris.”

It’s like an octopus. The octopus doesn’t just have one brain. Instead, each of its eight legs is controlled by an individual shard of intelligence while the whole creature is under the supervision of a central brain. That makes octopuses incredibly capable — they can escape from tanks, grip a vast range of objects and understand complex interactions between objects.

To optimize different parts of your website effectively, dividing your teams and giving them specific focuses is a great approach. They’re like those smart legs on the octopus. But when your whole business needs to move as one, you need to apply that central intelligence to get all the legs in the right direction.

If you’re looking for a mantra to help your teams, tell them this:

Be like the octopus.

If you’re looking for ways to better understand your website visitors’ behavior and a greater range of tools to improve your conversion rates, try SessionCam.

You can test the full range of intelligent features for free for three weeks right now. Just head here to get started.

*Note: This may not actually be the correct collective noun for creatives but if the

expensive cap fits.