Holiday Hiccups and Pivots | Ragnarokast #8

Steven

I’m Steven. 

Spencer

And I’m Spencer. Welcome to Ragnarokast, your podcast for all things marketing and MarTech. 

Steven

Hello everyone. 

Both

We’re the Co-CEOs of Ragnarok. 

Spencer

Hi there. 

Steven

Oh, hello there. 

Spencer

So we have two guests with us today, Shelly and Hannah. Would you like to introduce yourselves? 

Shelly

Sure thing. I am Shelly Alvarez, vice President of marketing Services here at Rag Rock, and I have been in the email and MarTech space for a very long time. Probably longer than I want to admit, about 25 years. 

Steven

Damn. 

Shelly

Okay. You didn’t have to say damn. 

Hannah

I am Hannah Garcia, associate Director of Marketing Services, AKA herder of cats. I’ve been at Ragnarok now for about a year and a half. Before that, I worked in product marketing and customer marketing, and I was also a software trainer for an ESP. 

Spencer

Excellent. Well, welcome Shelly and Hannah. Not like you don’t have to see our faces every day, but it’s good to see your faces on the podcast for the first time, hopefully not the last time. Also, I’d like to introduce a, new element to the podcast, if there’s some sort of technical goof or electronic issue, internet cutout, or something falls, you have to use what Steven and I call the unspellable noise, which is huh. 

And it’s just sort of like something silly happened. You have to acknowledge it because if you try to power through it, it’s gonna make you look more silly. So the idea is to recognize that. All right. So today we are here to talk about project management and managing your workload during the holiday season. I think that’s what we’re talking about. Is there a better way to phrase that, Shelly? I wanna make sure I’m fitting what you guys actually prepped for. I wanna lay you up properly

Shelly

Sure, absolutely. I think what Hannah and I wanna kind of talk mostly about today is after you’ve gotten through, your strategy piece for the holidays, just remember how important the project management piece is to make sure that you, you know, execute as close to perfection as you can. 

Steven

Damn well, 

Spencer

I don’t even have anything to follow up on that. Yeah, that’s, that’s perfect. 

So with that in mind, let’s get right into question number one. 

Steven

Duration, five minutes 

Spencer

Duration, five dash minutes colon to get them out of the way. What are some marketing project management horror stories you’ve heard of slash dealt with in the past?

Shelly

Well,, I do have one. I don’t know if it’ll be a five-minute story. It may be a, a three-minute story, but several years back, several years back, I had a client who unfortunately didn’t do proper load testing on their website. So to set the stage, there was, a very large event coming up. The type of event that doesn’t roll around every, you know, month. 

A very big event, we’ll just say. And the amount of traffic that they drove to the website, actually the website couldn’t handle it. That’s, some of that is a good problem to have. Right. The promotion, the promotion went very, very well. Well, the website crashed, and then you can imagine the finger-pointing, you know, and the blaming started the, the marketing the brand team

Steven

Who me?

Shelly

Exactly. The marketing and the brand team blamed the website team. The, website team blame blamed the the marketing team. 

And what we found out is that they actually did do, they did do load testing. What they failed to communicate on though was the landing page for the promotion was hosted by a third party. So while they did load testing on the website, they tested everything end to end. Somehow there was miscommunication that that landing page was not load tested. So while their own website held up the landing page for this particular promotion did not, and it crashed on their biggest day, 

Spencer

What were you able to take away from that? ’cause I feel like, you know, generally when those things kind of happen, you go, okay, next time you know x, y, Z. 

Shelly

Right, right. You know, after we brought the teams together and they were talking about the load testing that they did, one of the things that stood out is that everybody that had participated in the testing, they were very knee-deep in the project. And what I meant by that is they might say, okay, on day one we’re gonna send this email, but okay, remember guys, this email isn’t ready yet, so we just have to pretend to send the email on day two, we’re gonna do this. So there was a lot of these, we can’t quite test this, but I know what’s going to happen. And one of the things that we brainstormed on is bring someone in to test that doesn’t know anything, what’s going to happen. 

It could be someone from your team, heck, it could be a son, a daughter, a spouse, but bring someone in that really doesn’t know the experience. Let them look at it, you know, with fresh eyes so they could see everything and then have someone else document, you know, what’s going on. I think if maybe someone not quite so close to the project would’ve been there testing and then seen, oh, look, I’m going to a different landing page. You know, perhaps that could have saved, you know, some of this heartache. I think just them being so close into it and knowing what was going to happen next, they had that kind of distorted view, right, of, oh yes, we’ve tested from end to end. 

So I think maybe bringing someone else that doesn’t know anything about what’s going to happen perhaps could bring a different set of eyes to it. 

Steven

I like that. You know, it’s, it’s, another thing too that I always think about, especially with these big launches, is do you really need to send it all out at Exactly, yeah. 10:00 AM or 9:00 AM you know, like always do, yeah, a 10% or 15% batch, because if the, say for example, this, this landing page went down, well, it only affected a small amount of audience instead of everybody else. So we do that, especially with a lot of our clients when that big launches is, we always do like a, like a short seeds in send kind of early on and just double check everything one last time. It’s, especially if you’re in a, I like to call a legal compliance headache, you’re in FinTech or healthcare, you know, just get the, get a couple of the messages out. 

Just make sure that like you’re above board and you haven’t really forgotten anything. 

Shelly

Yes, yes, absolutely. 

Spencer

The prey and spray method is not something you really want to do in email marketing or you know, in marketing in general. So with that in mind, you know, I’ll direct this one towards Hannah. Hannah, what are some of the top tips for collaboration across teams for the holiday season? 

Hannah

Yeah, so this kind of plays off of what Shelly just talked about. I am definitely the kind of person that likes to play out, for better or worse, like every horrible scenario that could happen ahead of time. So my suggestion is kind of the opposite of having like too many cooks in the kitchen. My thought is really to avoid that cross-functional finger-pointing that Shelly had talked about, is to get really everybody in the room and outline the whole project, really the whole, the entire program, the specifics of what you’re going to do, who’s going to be QCing, and make sure that all the specs are lined out, and then let them poke holes in it. 

Let them find any areas where they think that you might not have considered something. So in this case, having multiple sets of eyes on the project can really help to minimize those potential hiccups. And then you’ll have this comprehensive list of all these potential horror outcomes, and then you can prioritize them and really make a plan for how you’re gonna prevent each one of them. 

Steven

So like a nice glass half full, you know, or half empty. You could go either way there. 

Hannah

Something that in your personal life might not be seen well, but it’s great for work. Yeah, 

Steven

I was just gonna wonder like, what happens if your project manager gets hit by a bus? Well, then who’s gonna put this project plan together to make sure that we found all the horror stories in the holes? 

Spencer

Well, I mean, maybe then there’s not too many cooks in the kitchen. Maybe you need, a sous chef and a line cook. 

Steven

Ooh, 

Spencer

What, what is it? The one that makes desserts. 

Hannah

Pastry chef. 

Spencer

Pastry chef. There you go. 

Shelly

Oh, the best chef. 

Spencer

Yeah. 

Hannah

Yeah. 

Steven

Somebody’s been watching the bear recently,

Spencer

So I was, I was making sort of a joking metaphor there. But I mean, the point is, I guess having contingencies also means having good documentation so that if someone has to step in for coverage, you’re covered. So it’s okay, you know if the executive chef has to take a sick day because the sous chef can step in and execute on the plan. And then one other question off of that is like, when you’re coming up through your, like paranoid contingencies in your brain, and as you’re writing them down, how do you determine the steps or like what is the optimal set of steps and who’s going to own what, how is that kind of documented and planned out? 

Shelly

Well, you’re asking the question to two of your most paranoid employees here, Hannah and Shelly. Talk about prepping for a disaster, we are your people, we are your people, to prep for disaster. 

You know, I think it just boils down to the things that, that Hannah said, you know, really the way to plan for the worst is, is really truly take a step back and list all of the things that could go wrong. And then, Spencer, if I’m understanding your, your question correctly, of those things that could go wrong, have a person that makes and is responsible for that plan to avoid that, you know, piece of their, you know, going back to the kitchen analogy, you know, avoid that piece of a, of a kitchen disaster. So everybody just, you know, really working towards, I mean, you don’t want people to be so scared of not, I hate to say, scared of success. 

You want people to be working towards the excitement of the program, the excitement of the launch. You don’t want them every day to be thinking, oh, what could go wrong? What could go wrong? But you do want a dose of that, right? You want them excited, to have the launch, whatever it is, but also with a dose of what could go wrong. And do we have a plan, you know, to address anything that could go wrong as much as you can. 

Steven

So, like, if I understand this correctly, Shale le you wanna walk on eggshells, but you want those eggshells to already be crunched up when you’re stepping on them. 

Shelly

I don’t even know how to answer that.

Spencer

Just nod your head and smile. There we go. Eventually, eventually it’ll go back into the woods. 

Shelly

Yes. Wait, what was that noise I was supposed to use? Spencer, 

Hannah

Can you have you guys record it so that Selin can just add that in whenever necessary?. 

Spencer

Oh, I love that. 

Steven

Get Selin to the soundboard of unspell noises. 

Hannah

Yes. 

Shelly

It kind of sounds like, a dying donkey. 

Hannah

It does, It does. It does. 

Spencer

Yeah. I think the origin of it was, you’re a teenager whose voice is cracking and you’re trying to get out a full sentence, but yes, your, your voice changes in the middle, so you’re like, you know, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll pretend to actually, no, I’m just gonna read the next question like this and you’ll see what I mean. 

Oh no, I’m probably gonna have to, I’m probably gonna have to read it again, but we’re gonna give it a shot. What are the top tips for marketing teams in terms of project management when approaching the holiday season? 

Well, actually, before we get into the next question, Hey Steven, you wanna read, read us off a dad joke? 

Steven

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. 

Excuse me while I pull up my dad jokes that aren’t off the top of my head. Did you hear that NASA is about to launch a new mission to say sorry to aliens for Earth polluting space? That’s right. It’s called Apollo G. 

Shelly

Yes. I love it. I love it. 

Spencer

I regret nothing. It was a G-rated joke. Oh, hey, did you make that one up? 

Steven

Oh, absolutely not. 

Spencer

Oh, okay. 

Steven

That’s off of somewhere. Dad says jokes 

Spencer

At dad says jokes. All right, we can, we can give them a little plug here. What are the top tips for marketing teams in terms of project management when approaching the holiday season? 

Hannah

So, Shelly and I will tag team this one. My first one is essentially, you know, going to beat the dead horse it plan ahead. So it’s the exact same thing that we just talked about earlier with documentation. So making a clear plan of, you know, who the driver is, what the deliverable is, what the timeline is, but also kind of like the backup plan or the cross training of how, how is there gonna be more than one person that really knows what’s happening in this area and who can continue to be accountable in the event that something goes not right. 

Steven

Sounds like an RACI chart. Huh? 

Spencer

Is that because you can’t say, are you spelling it because you can’t pronounce it Steven? 

Steven

No, no, no, no. But some people say RACI and then they think, oh, is it R-A-S-C-I or is it RACI? Because technically they’re both the same thing. But some people like that supportive person in there, you know, I could swing either way. 

Hannah

Yes, that would be a perfect example. 

Shelly

Okay. I guess I’ll take, the second one, Hannah. The second one is, don’t allow testing on new things. For example, don’t let Black Friday be the first time you test a new feature in your ESP. Or the first time you test video in your emails, or the first, you know, time you, you test out your, heck your new website. If we go back, you know, to, the analogy or the story that I, that I first tell, this doesn’t mean that you can’t do A/B split testing right this, but this just isn’t the first time to cut your teeth on anything brand new. You know, really at, at an important launch. 

That’s the time to use those, those tried and true methods that, that you’ve, you know, been practicing it on, on all year. I hope your takeaway is not, Shelly said don’t test. That’s not what Shelly said. Shelly just said Don’t test on a really big event. 

Steven

Sha lay lay did not say don’t test. 

Shelly

Yeah. 

Spencer

Basically don’t experiment with new untested experiments. 

Shelly

Yes, yes. It happens every year around the holidays. We’ll, we’ll have someone that’s a marketer that kind of wants to, wants to really shine during, during the holidays and, and you know, be able to say, wow, look at this great thing that I came up with. But it probably will cause more chaos than it will, or it could cause more chaos than it could lead to success if it doesn’t go right. 

Spencer

Stick to what you know works.  For this period, 

Shelly

Yeah, yeah.

For this Yep. Chaos. And and you have all year, you have all year to practice, right? You have all year to, to practice and, and try new things. 

Steven

That’s what we’re doing. We’re just, you know, every, every email we send is just a practice right Up until Thanksgiving day, you know, that’s the big day. 

Spencer

Well, don’t a lot of e-commerce brands, I think like make like half their revenue during the holiday season. So you do in a lot of ways the rest of the year really is practice because the impact is smaller. And now, don’t quote me on that, but I guess you, you have to ’cause it’s gonna be recorded, but, alright, fine. 

Moving on. Hannah

Hannah

Yeah, so, so essentially all of these are coming from, you know, you had your experience and you’re sitting down documenting what worked, didn’t work. And something that often comes up is this idea of don’t have a single point of failure. So the fact that, well why did this go wrong? Well, I reached out to Bobby Joe and Bobby Joe wasn’t available, right? It was after hours. You know, I don’t know if Bobby Joe’s a girl or a guy, so they had something, some kind of engagement in the evening and they weren’t available. There was no backup. So make sure that you are using a distribution list where you’re contacting multiple people. 

Make sure that people are cross-trained so that when you go to reach out to get a problem solved, you have someone there. Keeping in mind also that there’s tons of sick leave, tons of family leave during these like later months in the year. 

So this is kind of one of those times where you expect the unexpected and then you prepare for it. 

Steven

Dammit. Bobby, 

Shelly

Like Hannah, an example that comes to mind for me are babies. Babies kind of tend to come at their own time, don’t they? Yeah. Yeah. 

Hannah

Never, it’s never, never fallen a schedule. 

Spencer 

Baby. Bobby Joe, come on baby Bob, Joe, we’ve 

Steven

Got a new name for you. That’s what Spencer’s gonna name his son now it’s gonna be Bobby, Joe, 

Shelly

Bob, Joe Barrett. That kind of rolls off the tongue. Yeah. Bobby Joe Barrett. 

Hannah

Yeah. 

Steven

Baby Bobby Joe Barrett. 

Hannah

Okay. And then the next one is really taking that communication to the next level. So if you are a project manager or a team leader who normally communicates out kind of status updates weekly, maybe this is the time that it starts being daily and even po potentially overkill, that there’s a beginning of the day and end of the day it’s so nice to feel like you know what’s happening, that everybody knows what’s happening and you get a clear overview of what’s expected to happen that day, what didn’t end up happening that day, how you can prepare for the next day. So 

Shelly

Because people are going to wake up every day anxious every day, the, you know, during a, a big event like, like Black Friday, the, the brand manager, the email manager, the website manager, everyone will wake up, you know, filled with a little anxiety and stress until after the event’s over. Yeah. 

Spencer

They just, I mean, even customers feel that way. That’s true. I think even customers, you know, the, the general public feel that way on Black Friday. 

Shelly

Yeah, probably. So if there’s something you, you had your eye on need to get that TV Purchase tv. Yeah. 

Steven

We keep a long-running list in this household. The things we’re gonna buy on Black Friday and you just start signing up for email programs now, you know, 

Spencer

Good call 

Steven

Mostly furniture. 

Spencer

All right, what else have we got? Keep ’em coming. 

Shelly

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. After the event, you know, we just talked about the stress of leading up to the event. We keep using Black Friday as an example because it is just a good example. But once the event happens, you know, people tend to breathe a sigh of relief, take a vacation, et cetera. But that’s the time you wanna document. You wanna document everything that worked well. You want to document the challenges that you’ve had. You know, during this conversation, Hannah and I, we haven’t really focused on strategy, we’ve just been focusing on the project management of the event. But I’ll throw in strategy here. 

Like you wanna document everything, all of the strategy that worked well, the strategy that didn’t work well, the communication that worked well, that communication that didn’t work well. But the point is, document it right then because you will not remember when that event rolls around the next year. I promise you won’t remember. So document it immediately. 

Spencer

We got one last thing here for you. Hannah, take us away. 

Hannah

Yeah, I saved the best for last. So this is actually something that I love about Ragnarok. Ragnarok does a really good job of this. Keep in mind that it’s tremendously important to celebrate wins along the way. This is such a high stress environment where you’re planning for something that has a lot of impact on revenue. Your team is putting in, you know, tons of hours on these very visible, highly visible projects. And you want to make sure that they feel that your team members feel celebrated. That you know, each of the small victories are mentioned both privately and publicly. 

You wanna give those shout-outs and let your team know that they’re doing a great job. ’cause it is a long process. So making sure that all throughout the process you keep your team motivated and excited and, you know, eyes on the prize of like that buy and that ownership of why you’re doing, why you’re all doing this and that there’s going to be the, you know, benefits at the end of this. So love on your people. 

Spencer

So in, in honor of Shelly here, I went into Dall-e, which is related to ChatGPT and as an image prompt I wrote in Texan, blonde woman sends an email about Black Friday sales and it actually is definitely closer than the last time we did this. Does it have like made-up characters, like made-up words? 

Spencer

No, there’s, there’s no alien languages this time. Oh, here you go. So 

Steven

wait, wait. Face. Oh wait, wait, wait. Black cie, Friday, 

Shelly

Black Bracy, Bracy. 

Steven

There’s just something so weird with her face. Yeah, the eyes are so creepy. Oh my god. You got the one like bulging out there. 

Shelly 

She looks like she’s been through a black Friday. She’s just a little, A little worn out. 

Steven

Wow. I got a couple of them there. Oh, there we go. Lacck Biday Friday. 

Shelly

Lacck Biday. Oh Steven, add that to your list. 

Spencer

Oh god. Maybe the most unhinged. 

Steven

That is so unhinged

Spencer

That’s terrifying. Anyway, so I’ll leave you all with that image. 

Steven

Oh man. It’s so freaky.

Spencer

So with that in mind, I think we’ll wrap up there. Thank you to Steven, my co-host. Thank you to our guests here. Thank you to Cat and Selin who have helped produce this episode. Please subscribe to the podcast on your local podcast thingy of choice and Facebook and whatever else we’re doing out there. Follow and subscribe. 

Steven

Yeah,

Spencer

Thank you. Alright, bye everybody. 

Hannah

Bye.