April Gillam

When it comes to selecting and prioritizing innovation projects, assessing impact is key. Factors to consider are: 1) Value: What value impact will the initiative provide to patients, healthcare workers, the business, payors, and public health 2) Time: How much time will it take to achieve the projected impact? 3) Resources: What resources are needed, and how will it impact cross functional teams or business partners? 4) Competition: Is competition a threat to your innovation project?

The motivation to innovate cross-functionally accelerates when impact can be seen and felt. A great leader I work with says, “ROI is a feeling.” When product teams can feel and see the return on investment from their innovation work quickly, it increases their motivation to do more. That’s why it’s key to get our product teams in front of end users when innovating and iterating. They need to hear, see, and feel the needs and impacts of their innovation work. Customer interviews shouldn’t be limited to sales and success teams playing telephone with the product team, or it will limit the agility and efficacy of innovation.

Understand that even when you segment your customer base, the customer’s behaviors are going to evolve based on changes in technology, the economy, location, buying patterns, and other influences like social media. It’s vital that you stay up to date on what influences your core customer’s behaviors to evaluate whether you should be involved with that channel or simply monitor how that channel influences your customer’s behavior. If you have an emerging customer segment of interest that is growing quickly, you should also understand the driver of growth with proportional focus.

As a leader, being the first to call out your own mistakes and what you learned from them paves the way for those around you to do the same. When you publicly ask for your own feedback in a team meeting and demonstrate humility, it lays the foundation to become the cultural norm instead of defensiveness becoming the default. When teams embrace how to quickly move forward from challenges, conflict, or failures and foster a culture of continual improvement through talking about the hard things without involving unnecessary negative emotions, they naturally become more agile and productive. Just like a muscle of the body, this type of communication must be exercised regularly.

Using the DACI (Driver, Accountable, Contributor, Informed) framework for a project you need to delegate can help a leader regulate their own urges to get too involved or feel guilt about delegating. This framework empowers drivers to get projects complete, as well as the accountable and contributor parties to clearly know their roles in the process. Setting clear ownership, boundaries, and timelines about when deliverables and feedback sessions will happen can aid cross functional groups as well as leaders stay mindful of what they are working towards with minimal mental swirl for all.

Understand the best SEO is: -Multichannel -Constantly evolving -Should reflect the voice of the customer -Have increasingly high quality of rich media that reflects your goods and services One of the best ways to do this is providing frictionless review prompts to your customers to not only surface on Google but your digital properties as well. As unique, relevant images and videos rise in value to organic ranking and your GMB profile, media files should be prioritized as well to grow organically.