Web Performance and the Customer Experience

As technology executives we are responsible for many different things outside of just the overall technology direction and spending of our companies. We have many stakeholders, from business units to product owners, as well as the overall company goals set by our CEOs.

Our business unit wants us to drive online sales and conversions and enable self-service as well as lower costs and overhead. After table stakes are accomplished, we need to up the ante to take advantage of machine learning to identify problem patterns and integrate with alternate payment methods like Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and eventually cryptocurrencies. This is, in essence, the digital transformation that many in our field have been taking part in, as a response by the larger companies that started before the ubiquity of the internet, to new companies that have come to similar prominence who have only an online presence.

Digital transformations come with their own set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to track, like bill pays and conversions as well as business sector–specific things like calls in to help desks or walk-ins to physical locations.

Our product owners want to continually develop new things—new features, new products, and new concepts to entertain or enable customers. These new products also have their own KPIs, things like usage and logins, and even sentiment analysis from social media.

In the middle of this flurry of information to track and influence ...