Bored of Scrum and Kanban? Thinking about making the move to Shape Up?

This post is here to get you clued up on what the development methodology Shape Up looks like in practice. I’ll be giving you a sneak-peak into what we do here at Process Street as our EPD team shares their secrets. Learn how Shape Up facilitates the smooth running of a cross-functional team.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Shape Up, or if you’re interested in the Design part of the E-P- “D = design” team,or maybe, you’d like to get your hands on 3 Shape Up workflows to plug straight into your team, check out the following posts:

• Shape Up vs Scrum: 6 Months to 6 Weeks – How We Cut Our Dev Cycle 75%
• An Interview with Ivy: Shape Up From a Product Designer’s Perspective
• Ditch Scrum! 3 Shape Up Processes & Checklists to 5x Your Dev Cycle

In this post I speak to Process Street’s Product Lead, Michael, and our Full Stack Engineer Herbie. We talk about all things Shape Up and discuss how the methodology facilitates the success of a cross-functional team.

• Q1: Summarize what the EPD team is, and your role within the team.
• Q2: As a Product Lead what would you say are the key differences between Shape Up and say something like Scrum or Kanban?
• Q3: How do you find working in small highly focused cycles as opposed to Sprints
• Q4: Does the Shape Up method allow for more asynchronous communication (and less meetings)?
• Q5: As a Product Lead/Engineer am I right to think you work on a parallel track with other members of the EPD team. Could you talk me through this process?
• Q6: What does Shape Up empower you to do?
• Q7: This is your area of expertise, what are your key takeaways when it comes to Shape Up, how it works alongside the EPD team, and so on.

Let’s get started!
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As your marketing team’s content manager, you want to be able to know your content engine is working for you at maximum efficiency, and have a clear overview of the important work being done.

This is perhaps easier said than done, when there can be countless systems and processes to keep track of, from marketing operations, onsite content, offsite comarketing relations, email correspondences, to SEO reporting – it can all become overwhelming.

But it doesn’t have to be!

Wouldn’t it be great if you could benefit from detailed reporting without having to bend over backwards restructuring your meetings and how you collect data?

Well, that’s more or less how we’ve set up reporting in our marketing team at Process Street. In this post I’ll briefly summarize how our marketing team saves time and effort with a nifty workflow that utilizes Automations and native integrations, and allows us to:

• Coordinate dozens of comarketing relationships while maintaining clear record of communications;
• Track the number of guest posts we’ve accepted and published;
• Highlight top priority action items;
• Quickly & easily analyze referring domains of target pages;
• Automatically push everything into Google Sheets;
• Automatically generate graphs and charts;
• Automatically post a Slack message with key marketing reporting metrics;

Specifically, this post will cover:

• Why you should consider automating your marketing operations;
• Our marketing operations reporting toolkit;
• How we automated reporting of our marketing operations;

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“Running a business and integrating two companies is like having two different jobs and both are equally important.” – Chris Barbin, CEO, Founder, Entrepreneur

Only one-third of mergers and acquisitions successfully create shareholder value. More often than not, this is down to failures during the post-merger integration (PMI) process. Cari Windt, who specializes in organizational design and change management, pins this on a lack of planning; CEO Christ Barbin claims it’s a lack of execution.

These two problems, however, are not mutually exclusive. Executing a poor plan can be more harmful than not executing a plan at all.

Being aware of the challenges of post-merger integrations and developing a thorough PMI process can both go a long way to ensuring yours runs smoothly. But how do you determine if total integration is right for your organization?

This Process Street post will look at the 4 main post-merger strategies and when you should use them:

• The shape of post-merger integration
• Consolidation post-merger strategy: Gain scale and cost synergy
• Transformation post-merger strategy: Reposition your identity
• Tuck-in post-merger strategy: Tech and talent acquisitions
• Bolt-on post-merger strategy: Increase your portfolio

Let’s dive in!
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Health and wellness experts are experiencing 10x higher profit margins thanks to the strategies offered by the premier community, Mindshare Collaborative.

Mindshare Collaborative was founded by JJ Virgin, a New York Times best-selling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and Fitness Hall of Famer. Virgin started the company to give the information and support needed for health and wellness experts to build a successful brand and grow.

Mindshare has generated over $50 million in book advances and has helped launch more NYT bestselling books, podcasts, summits, and docuseries than any other health group.

Process Street is a vital part of Mindshare’s offering, and we spoke to some of Mindshare’s top clients to find out how we have benefited them.
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Companies with a customer-centric account health scoring system enjoy a 95% increase in customer retention.

To be more customer-centric, you need an account health scorecard that takes a holistic approach to measure your health and your customers’ health. In this Process Street article, we’ll show you how to do that.

We’ve produced your ultimate workflow guide to help you create this account health scorecard. This template is free for you to use from your Process Street account (you can sign up to create your free account here). This workflow guide has been produced based on the Customer-Centric Digital Transformation report by Deloitte.

You’ll also learn the key benefits you’d expect from taking this holistic approach to measuring an account’s health, with two real-life case studies.

This article is structured as follows:

• Create an account health scorecard that measures customer and business success
• Why you need an account health scorecard
• Case studies: Applying the account health scorecard approach in real life

Let’s get started!
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According to Deloitte Insights, advances in technology are changing the business landscape and they are calling this a digital disruption. This is altering customer expectations and demands, presenting critical challenges for customer success teams globally.

To successfully ride this wave of change, Deloitte – and us here at Process Street – believe businesses should rethink how they are measuring value delivered to the customer. The aim is to ensure these measurements are customer-centric to refine CS activities and enhance the customer’s experience.

Think of it as a customer success evolution in response to digital disruption.

This CS transformation has the potential to bolster positive referrals by 83%, lower costs by 20%, and increase customer lifetime value by x1.6.

What have you got to lose?

In this article, you’ll learn how to apply a customer-centric means of measuring customer value generated for your organization. I’ve split the process down into three steps based on the Customer-Centric Digital Transformation report by Deloitte.

• From churn reduction to customer value generation (applying customer success 2.0)
• Measuring value in 3 steps: Determining customer and internal success
• Determining value generated – Step #1: Measure the outside-in value perception
• Determining value generated – Step #2: Measuring inside-out value perception
• Determining value generated – Step #3: Measuring internal success using business outcomes

With that said, let’s jump straight to it!
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Guest post written by David Campbell, a digital marketing specialist at Ramp Ventures. He helps manage the content marketing team at Right Inbox. When he’s not working, he enjoys traveling and trying to learn Spanish.

Co-marketing is a strategy in which complementary brands combine expertise, audiences, and distribution to create something more useful than either could produce alone. For content teams, that can mean joint research, webinars, expert contributions, or other assets that earn relevant editorial backlinks because people genuinely want to cite them.

Alex Husar is the Chief Technology Officer at Onilab. For over eight years, he’s been working on Magento migration and development projects as well as building progressive web apps (PWAs). Alex is an expert in full-stack development who shares his expertise and in-depth knowledge on modern technologies and Computer Software Engineering.

Ecommerce businesses all over the globe have never been as focused on delivering the best possible user experience as now. The mobile-first approach, never-ending performance optimization, and the move towards headless ecommerce architecture are among core signs of this trend.

It’s about to accelerate in the coming months and years. Google has recently announced significant changes in its search ranking, connected exactly with the way people perceive websites. Page experience metrics will soon join other crucial indicators that influence websites’ positions in SERPs.

There are the Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• First Input Delay (FID)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

These signals reflect how successfully users interact with web pages. The aim of measuring them is to improve the level of satisfaction from such experiences considerably.

Firstly, in this article for Process Street, we’ll get acquainted with the peculiarities of Core Web Vitals. And, secondly, we’ll consider what tweaks you could make to ameliorate these metrics on Magento-based online stores.

• Why worry about Core Web Vitals?
• How to measure Core Web Vitals
• Magento: Improve Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• Magento: Fix First Input Delay (FID)
• Magento: Stabilize Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Let’s get started!
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A recent Deloitte study found a mere 30% of respondents stated customer success was a strategic priority by the board of directors. Only 26% reported official business communications to regularly mention customer success.

At Process Street, we find this concerning. Technological advancements and the rise of Industry 4.0 are altering the business landscape. Businesses are facing new pressures, with changing customer demands and expectations as the biggest catalyst altering how business is done. To respond, organizations need to focus on customer success (CS).

Businesses need to lead a successful customer success transformation, one that means they’re more customer-centric. In this Process Street article, I explain how organizations should do this in three simple steps.

• Why we need to think differently about customer success
• The companies leading in customer success are making a customer-centric transition
• 3 steps to manage your customer-centric transition

With that said, let’s jump straight to it!
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“Employees in a well-structured onboarding program are 69% more likely to remain at the company after 3 years.” – Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), 2010 Employee Benefits

1 out of 25 employees leave their new job due to substandard onboarding experiences.

In contrast, a good employee onboarding program can boost employee retention by 69% after 3 years.

Process Street is dedicated to helping our users improve their business operations, and employee onboarding is a prime focus area. On this, we’re surprised to learn that some of our customers have been using Excel for employee onboarding.

According to Harvard Business Review, companies – on average – lose 23% of their new hires after one year. A more thoughtful approach to employee onboarding can dramatically improve this statistic for your organization; and for that, we say, get off Excel.

“…a lot of B2B productivity products are competing with Excel sheets and other products that are totally not built for the specific problem they solve.” – Bram Kanstein, Tech Out Loud, The Product Before the Business by Bram Kanstein

In this Process Street article, you’ll learn why Excel sucks for employee onboarding, and why workflow management solutions offer better onboarding solutions.

Click on the relevant subheader to jump to your section of choice, alternatively scroll down to read all we have to say.

• Scenario: Onboarding using Excel
• 8 reasons why you need to ditch Excel as your employee onboarding software
• Overcoming Excel onboarding limitations with a workflow management solution

Let’s jump to it!
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