As a program manager, getting everyone on the same page is key for delivering impact. Especially when your company is hundreds, if not thousands, of people strong. That means finding ways to keep everyone involved across many different disciplines.
Elizabeth Hall, Senior Beta Program Manager at Appian, recently joined us on The Delta Huddle Podcast to discuss how she keeps stakeholders engaged with tailored results, and why it’s important to include many different teams in a beta program.
“We have obviously… the product managers involved, but as I mentioned a bit earlier on, we have our customer success team that helps customers be successful with our software and they're usually involved as well.” Hall said, stressing that involving as many teams as possible was crucial in a cross-functional environment.
“We're involving UX designers, we have the actual software engineers who are building the products.”
“Sales is important too, but they really help us with recruiting and account management. So if we're working with an account and maybe it's somebody who was super engaged at first, but they fall in off a bit working with the account teams to determine a strategy to re-engage them and keep them… working on using and implementing it and making sure they're going to be successful in the long run… that's a super important role as well.
And creating strong team partnerships doesn’t stop with just including them; it also means tailoring your communications to match what each team cares about. That includes both the quantitative data and the qualitative stories coming from your tests.
“I would say don’t underestimate the voice of the customer,” said Hall.
“Maybe that's just my own experience, but I think qualitative data is just as important, if not more important sometimes, where you can really dig into a customer's story and put together a case study or a testimonial or something like that, a data point alone, or some aggregate number or percentage can't sell. I think both have their place and together can tell a complete story.”
You can hear the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or watch the episode here on YouTube.
