Why, How, and Where Transformation Breaks

Key Takeaways

• People are inherently resistant to change, particularly when those driving the change cannot properly communicate their fundamental ‘value’

  
  

• Engaging the right players throughout a transformation results in faster implementation

  
  

• Documenting the lessons learned in a single source of truth ‘playbook’ prevents similar mistakes from occurring in the future

Navigating unchartered territory

In my most recent role at Verizon, I was brought over to the Real Time Marketing (RTM) program to create the ‘playbook’ for a role that had not yet existed within the program’s pilot operating model.

This role, known as the ‘scale lead,’ was responsible for ensuring the testing team’s learnings were applied as ‘best practices’ across the business. This was an important role because each testing team had associated revenue targets and the financial benefits secured from each winning test would not be applied until the scale lead got these efforts implemented.

I had two objectives:

1. Determine how this new position fit within the testing team structure

   
   

2. Convince existing key channel partners to apply our infant testing program’s learnings into their marketing campaign tactics (ex: digital marketing landing page, email, etc.).

   
   

Stumbling to find my ‘value’

Tying back to my Track and Field days, the scale lead was the anchor leg in the RTM's agile test and learn ‘race.’ I could not begin my work until the team secured an A/B test win, which was infrequent. When those opportunities did present themselves, I ran into various roadblocks.

I documented these pain points so I could develop workflow optimizations to help our team win:

Scalability feasibility was not identified in the test planning stage.

By not being involved in test design discussions, I could not consult our digital site development partners as to whether they could ‘scale’ the winning concept. In turn, there were multiple instances where our team lost out on revenue due to the technical complexity and/or associated development costs.

Key ‘players’ were missing from upfront stakeholdering discussions.

As a new team, we (unintentionally) did not share our test design proposals to page and/or product strategy leads for feedback because we were tasked with maintaining the mandated 2 week test sprint cycle.

In turn, when I went to have those ‘scaling alignment’ conversations with those individuals or teams, they would reject the winning concept because it either did not align with their long-term roadmap strategy or they felt scorned that their input was not included upfront.

The business did not understand our team’s value.

The majority of teams across the Consumer business unit were not aware of the RTM pilot program and how we could help amplify their team’s performance. Many actually saw RTM as a ‘threat’ and claimed that they were already doing this type of work. In turn, this presented an opportunity for my Sr. Director and I to roadshow the RTM program across dozens of organizations to quell teams’ concerns.

The turnaround

Through these trials and tribulations, I developed the end-to-end process framework for a RTM scale lead to successfully secure both business and development implementation alignment prior to our team’s test launch. In turn, I achieved the following wins:

• Scaling implementation timing dropped by 50% (<30 days average vs. > 2 months prior)

  
  

• Prospect annualized revenue generated by our testing team increased from $8M to $56M (a 600% YoY increase)

  
  

• The scale lead role expanded to 4 other individuals across the Real Time Marketing program and resulted in my promotion to overall program management operations

Transforming ambiguity into structured, enterprise-scale execution engines takes time. However, having allies that understand and can communicate your value to skeptics is a critical lever for reducing organizational friction.

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About the Author:

Kate Lisofsky is an Execution Partner at Goalster, a former collegiate athlete, and a former Verizon operations leader who consistently transformed ambiguity into scalable workflows. She joined Goalster to help other organizations navigate change, execute and win at scale. 

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