When organizations first start with CRO, it is often an online marketer or analyst who is responsible for everything. They run online marketing campaigns, create dashboards, conduct web analyses, and occasionally run an A/B test. However, as organizations become more serious about CRO, they may hire a dedicated CRO specialist and, from there, build the Conversion Rate Optimization team.
Hiring a CRO Specialist: The Jack of All Trades
When a manager gets a bit more serious about CRO, she hires a dedicated CRO specialist. This specialist generally sits in the marketing or e-commerce department and still is a jack of all trades. He does the research, sets the hypothesis, writes the code for your test, makes the designs, knows about psychology, does the copy testing, and everything else.
Managers need to be aware that as this person becomes more knowledgeable, colleagues may start asking them to do a lot of small tasks, generally related to web analytics. This can quickly flood the agenda, prohibiting this person from running A/B tests, which is essential for providing value to the company.
Building a Conversion Rate Optimization Team: Hiring the Right Specialists
To avoid this, organizations should invest in more team members to help with CRO. A developer and UX designer are generally the first to join the team. Next, an analyst, UX researcher, psychologist, and copywriter could join. When deciding what specialists to hire, starting with your bottleneck is important. For example, if development is your bottleneck, hire a developer. If you need more designs, hire a UX designer. And if the analysis is your bottleneck, hire a dedicated analyst.
In an ideal situation, a Conversion Rate Optimization team should have at least a:
- Lead
- Designer
- Developer
- Web analyst
From there, the team can keep growing and adding more members. It’s important to make sure that new team members match the organization’s culture and have an experimentation mindset, as well as being candid, having a growth mindset, and being willing to contribute to getting the organization to an experimentation culture.
Scaling Up: From a Conversion Rate Optimization Team to experimentation
As organizations mature, they may begin to organize multiple multi-disciplinary teams to work on experimentation. At this stage, A/B testing and other forms of experimentation happening in various teams, and Conversion Rate Optimization is a part of the whole experimentation program. How these teams are organized will depend on the organization. A team can be responsible for a part of the customer journey, or it can be product-led. To support these teams, organizations must set up a CRO center of excellence.
Overcoming Resource Bottlenecks
It is important to note that resources are often a bottleneck when scaling up experimentation. For example, the number of experiments may be limited due to a lack of developers. However, what may seem like a resource problem is often a cultural problem. When higher management does not accept an experimentation mindset, organizations may not get the budget to hire new specialists. The same happens when management sets a too-narrow scope for experimentation.
Building a successful Conversion Rate Optimization team
In conclusion, building a successful Conversion Rate Optimization team involves hiring the right specialists and organizing them in a way that makes the most sense for your organization. It’s important to start with your bottleneck and address it accordingly, whether it’s development, design, or analysis. Additionally, it’s important to remember that resources may be a bottleneck, but it’s often a cultural problem. When there is a lack of resources, it’s important to check why this is the case and address it accordingly. You can learn all of this, and much more, in my Change Management: from CRO to an experimentation culture course. On my course page, you can find a discount for the course.
Overall, building a successful CRO team requires a combination of the right people, processes, and culture. Organizations can increase their online revenue and achieve their business goals by focusing on these key elements.
