Greeting! My name is Ksenia, I am a product manager at SM Lab. I want to share our experience of changing the workflow of working with business — here is finishing a number of processes, and improving coordination between departments, and finalizing reports, and in general a lot of useful things.

It helped us to significantly improve the interaction between marketing and business during the launch and implementation of advertising campaigns. Perhaps it will be useful for your needs.

What started it all.

The “running season” was in full swing and marketing needed to run campaigns to match. But do it not just like that, but in accordance with the marketing calendar and using strategic segments. Creating and calculating these segments required cross-functional team interaction. Unfortunately, at that time it was difficult to call the process itself transparent for all participants, and what happened was that the strategic segments at the exit were unsuitable for launching campaigns. And to sit and list them again, including rewriting the storefronts from scratch, is quite a significant expense.

STATIC

The main thing in such situations is to collect normal feedback from process participants in order to feel for bottlenecks. We collected feedback from marketers, discussed it within the team and realized that all the details of the process should be described in detail. Detailed and clear.

And our methodologist offered to describe the workflow according to STATIK (System Thinking Approach for Introducing Kanban).

STATIK helps to consider almost all aspects of the life of a team or unit, both internally and externally. There is a main approach that can help you solve the task – to take and describe backwards the already solved, successfully completed task. To do this, you need to draw a block diagram from Done to Start.

What does it give?

For marketers – ensuring the ability to quickly launch chains of marketing campaigns and increase the level of personalization of mailings.

This helps to highlight the criteria of satisfaction – in our case it happened that now each participant in the process has a literal understanding of what segments he wants to get at the exit. And the size of such segments currently corresponds to the quality.

This is how we modeled the new STATIK workflow

1. From Done to Started.

We began to describe to ourselves the process of creating showcases of strategic segments from end to end. This helps identify certain problem areas.

2. Process discussion

We collected information about the interaction between teams from all workflow participants, thanks to which we discovered a number of interesting and not always obvious details.

3. Narrow places

Everything is simple here – the more questions you ask, the more blind spots you can find.

The new workflow helped us:

• Describe the entire process by stages

• Identify stages with cross-functional interaction

• Identify those responsible for each stage

• Identify risks at each stage.

Then we:

• A joint meeting was held with all process participants to verify the implementation of the new segmentations described in the workflow – this helps to increase the efficiency of the overall process and reduce the costs of implementation teams.

• We raised a number of questions to all participants in the process – this is how we managed to discuss all the fine details and make the process transparent for everyone.

• It was found out at what stages it is necessary to introduce additional agreements and discussions so that everyone has the same understanding of which segments will be at the exit and how they can be used for marketing campaigns.

Final benefit

Of course, the final beneficial effect from STATIC will greatly depend on what task you use it for.

Speaking specifically about our case, we were able to:

• At the segment discussion stage, identify the need for all communications in direct and digital, connect colleagues from marketing for discussion.

• Machine learning team to discover the business logic of segmentation for marketers.

• Launch marketing campaigns using new segments only after they have been agreed upon and defended to management.

And have you used STATIK to solve marketing or development tasks? What do you (dis)like about the methodology?