Digital Experience Management: The Battleship Cheat Codes

The best digital experience strategy is like Battleship without the guesswork.

Most of us know Battleship, the classic naval game popularized in 1967 by Milton Bradley. If you’re slightly long in the tooth, like me, you may remember playing the board version with the pegs and miniature plastic ships. Kids will be kids, and the only way you could know the location of sister Susie’s fleet was if you snuck a quick peek, which was still not much better than guessing.

Now that the game is digitized, there’s no longer a way to sneak a peek at Susie’s Android-based fleet anchored in San Diego when you’re playing from behind the screen of your iPhone. Statistically, there are millions of possible configurations, and relying on a battleship probability calculator offers an edge.

What if you could always know the location of your opponent’s fleet map? What if you could be professionally clairvoyant and know the Battleship Cheat Codes?

Guessing often creates terrible consequences.

When I was a consulting engineer, my boss used to say something when he’d get a nebulous reply to a specific question. It stays with me to this day. “Don’t make me guess because I will. And if I guess, I may guess wrong”. 

It made me laugh at the time, but I realized that guessing creates unintended outcomes that often have terrible consequences. As a Digital Leader, if you are providing your team with tools that only allow them to estimate the effectiveness of their efforts, then you shouldn’t expect consistent output. In other words, don’t expect predictable outcomes if your tools won’t allow you to accurately measure the impact of web optimizations before you initiate them. 

The Battleship strategy of guesswork has been happening in eCommerce when optimizing web performance and the digital experience. DevOps, Engineering, and CX Teams are often limited to speculating which site optimization projects will create maximum conversions and revenue.

If these teams guess correctly, they get to take another turn and speculate again. However, if they are wrong, the business may silently lose customers and revenue, which is often expressed through permanently diminished retention and loyalty.

Guesswork isn’t a sustainable digital experience strategy for your organization. You need a holistic platform that will reveal the impact of your optimization projects in the same way that you’d like to know the exact location of your enemy’s Battleship Fleet.

Once revealed, you’ll experience a continuous series of “direct hits” for your digital projects that allow you to prioritize by their impact on the business. And the outcome of every project always impacts CX by uncovering where customer frustration lives on the website. 

Digital Experience Management (DEM) – A Digital Optimization Best Practice

There is a swift path to victory if you use technologies that begin with business outcomes and finish with expected results. A Digital Experience Management (DEM) Platform enables this best practice. Rather than relying on siloed, engineering-oriented tools that measure site speed, among other site metrics, Blue Triangle’s DEM Platform accurately correlates revenue opportunity to every piece of content, code, or technology involved with your website. CX, SRE, DevOps, and Product Teams are no longer restricted to guessing at remediation projects which are supposed to generate revenue or prevent revenue loss. 

Engineering-Oriented Tool vs. Business-Oriented Platform

The path toward optimization is a choice between flying blind or leveraging a platform that informs you on what projects will provide the greatest revenue uplift or business outcomes. For example, let us examine traditional site performance and site monitoring tools.

Licensed site monitoring tools measure all the performance metrics an engineer could ever want. From backend metrics such as Redirect, DNS, TCP, SSL, and 1st Byte to front-end metrics like Time to DOM Interactive, Time to DOM Content Loaded, DOM Duration, Onload, and more. 

Some may only have limited visibility into your all-important user-centric performance metrics. These vendor tools are useful but were only designed to improve engineering outcomes. They were never designed to let you know the effectiveness of each enterprise-wide business outcome.

Engineering tools often begin with metrics and try to arrive at business decisions based on feeling. Optimization or performance projects are made without ever knowing if the improvements will predictably drive more engagement, conversions, and revenue. Like the Battleship Probability Calculator, Blue Triangle’s DEM Platform removes the guesswork.

The Digital Commerce Winners

If you want favorable engineering outcomes then buy engineering-oriented tools. But if you desire beneficial engineering and business outcomes, invest in a business-driven optimization platform that empowers users with the information needed to create an ROI.

Digital commerce winners don’t gamble unnecessarily. They quickly arrive at desired business/revenue outcomes created from the specific optimizations surfaced by the Enterprise DEM. Sure, the supporting evidence for each desired business outcome expresses itself within some of the metrics engineering monitoring tools provide, but the difference between starting with business value first versus starting with a series of engineering tasks will quickly determine which eCommerce brands will come out on top. 

The Bottom Line

• eCommerce is engaged in a high-stakes game of Battleship. Encouraging guesswork is not a sustainable solution to help the business successfully and predictably optimize its website and digital investments. Augment your human decision-making with advanced machine learning when you have the opportunity.
  
• The path toward maximum profitability is identifying the most beneficial or profitable digital performance projects for the business. Blue Triangle allows you to know which site optimizations have the greatest impact, how much revenue you are leaving on the table, and the best way to claim those opportunities.
  
• The very best DEM Platforms accurately correlate revenue opportunity to every piece of content, code, or technology involved with your website. Blue Triangle allows you to repeatedly prioritize site optimization by engagement and revenue opportunity with confidence.
  
• Performance monitoring tools are for engineering. They begin with metrics and try to arrive at business decisions by forcing the engineers to guess which optimization or performance project will make a favorable impact. In contrast, Blue Triangle’s DEM allows you to quickly arrive at desired business/revenue outcomes created by specific optimizations across multiple teams.

You no longer must guess which projects produce the biggest impact on your business. Schedule an introductory overview to experience how your digital world and your customers' journey will improve for the better with Blue Triangle.