As CRO of Incredibuild, Reggie leads the go-to-market group and global business and expansion efforts.
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The ongoing period of economic volatility has backed the global tech industry into a corner, layoffs are still making headlines, valuations and funding rounds continue to deflate and companies must make do with fewer resources to meet market demands.
To regain ground in the wake of downsizing, industry players can leverage technological solutions to infuse their operations in three key areas: automation, auditing and transparency. Those that do so can survive and even thrive during the economic storm and beyond.
Automation Nation
When staffing is a challenge, optimizing the overall effectiveness of existing team members becomes critical, which is why enterprises look to software tools capable of automating manual jobs that are either time-consuming or prone to human error. According to a recent survey, 90% of enterprises are looking for simpler automation tools to streamline daily management tasks in order to allocate more time to strategy. Automating redundant, time-consuming tasks not only allows employees to focus their valuable time on creativity and quality but also accelerates the go-to-market (GTM) strategy—lowering frustration and burnout levels while increasing job satisfaction.
Automated IT and platforms that help reduce mundane tasks, in particular, afford developer teams more robust resource management, greater compute flexibility and savings, boosting companies’ competitive edge and certainly improving developer satisfaction, allowing them to focus on what they really like to do. For instance, implementing a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline and equipping it with the right acceleration and automation tools based on specific needs stands to systematically increase productivity across all GTM teams.
Business leaders can start by reviewing their companies’ entire software development and deployment cycles and identifying places, parts of the journey or KPIs that can be improved, save time or save resources. Setting improvement KPIs for their teams will enable them to revisit when done to explore ROI.
Increased Auditing
For many companies, the concept of increased self-scrutiny and internal audits can be daunting. But by continually running audits throughout the course of a fiscal year, business leaders can better examine processes, activities and outcome metrics. They can then assess how and where to make improvements within relevant teams and adjust processes accordingly with far more real-time relevance than if they only relied on an annual audit. According to reports, 70% of companies utilizing applied observability tools and operations will help cut down latency for business and IT decision making.
There are many available tools to help track the minutiae of back-end operations—salaries, compensation planning and management tools, business intelligence (BI) and more. Utilizing software will save time for oversight teams and help leaders and team members across the organization focus more on what matters: their customers and partners.
Moreover, when combined with the right customer data, savvy BI tools not only save time for internal employees but also render valuable insight into the wants and needs of users. And providing teams with smart customer relationship management (CRM) tools empowers marketers to more easily personalize campaigns, tracking relevant customer metrics and streamlining outreach, which is also more likely to lead to optimized sales planning and product forecasting.
A great way to do that would be to set up performance alerts around key metrics that will continually pinpoint benchmarks for teams. Also, instead of doing full-scope audits (which can be hard to do on a weekly or monthly basis), companies can implement a frequent mini-audit cadence, each time focusing on another area of business.
Augmenting The Internal “Handshake”
With so much on their plates, it is easy for business leaders to gloss over the essentials of internal communication: task handover, project collaboration and more. There are many ways to iron out these wrinkles between teams.
When working on cutting budgets and delivering realistic roadmaps without compromising performance and stability, it is not enough to maintain best communication practices within direct managerial teams. Leaders must work together to ensure enterprise-wide strategic planning and communication to minimize confusion and bottlenecks and streamline inter-company processes.
Increasing transparency between team leaders and employees at all levels of the business hierarchy helps create a clearer picture of exactly what is expected of the company as a whole, of each team and of each employee, reducing redundancy and ensuring better deliverables regardless of economic circumstances.
As a way to go here, setting up clear written R&Rs (or ROE–rules of engagement) and making sure that communication between teams is clear, coherent and direct (think “no stories policy”) will go a long way toward efficiency.
High Tech Can Help Save Itself
Throughout any company’s journey—and all the more so during times of economic uncertainty—business leaders must take stock of company resources and make the most out of who or what is available. To realize the potential of every team without compromising product quality or the well-being of employees, organizations must implement automation wherever possible, conduct consistent audits to assess where there is room for improvement, and augment the communication flow between teams.
Though in tough times, such tactics may be implemented out of anxiety, they are far more than "foul-weather friends"—utilizing them stands to enhance business productivity well into the future, no matter the economic climate.
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