The Ultimate Field Guide to Digital Program Management

Book Preface

Step 1: Start with business goals

The most common flaw of digital practice is that their activities don’t ultimately drive concrete business outcomes. Digital practices too often focus on driving digital outcomes only: more visits to a website, more mentions of the brand, more likes and shares on social channels, and so on. This isn’t to say that the above are in any way unimportant. Digital outcomes like these have value they have their role to play but they are not, in and of themselves, primary business objectives. They are intermediate business objectives, secondary business objectives. But any digital practice that aims to drive secondary business objectives and not primary business objectives will always fall short of expectations.

Before an organization gets ahead of itself with strategy and tactics, it needs to start at the beginning. It needs to start with purpose and value, with basic questions about what a digital practice should drive. To do that, it needs to cast assumptions aside and make sure it asks the right questions.

The beginning then, the starting point, is not what should we do on digital channels? It is not how should we use email and Twitter and LinkedIn? Those questions come later. Companies that start here skip a crucial step in the planning process. The beginning has nothing to do with digital channels. The beginning focuses entirely on the business, and it is simply this: What needles are we trying to move in the next year? What business objectives are we, as a company, focused on? Borrowing from WOM (word-of-mouth) pioneer Brains on Fire’s famous question: What will you be celebrating in six months?

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