Blog posts by Eric Deschambault2023-11-13T04:18:17.0000000Zhttps://world.optimizely.com/blogs/eric-deschambault/Optimizely WorldMy Opticon 2023 highlights<p>Opticon 2023, held under the radiant San Diego sun, has concluded, and as we bid farewell to this remarkable event, I wanted to take the time to reflect on the moments I've experienced during the conferences and keynote sessions. This year's gathering was really exciting, as it was evident that Optimizely's investments in digital tools have reached a level of seamless integration that empowers marketing and digital teams to take full ownership of their digital assets, fostering an environment where involvement, learning, and experimentation thrive in the ever-evolving digital landscape.</p>
<p>One standout revelation was the introduction of Optimizely One—a promising addition to the toolkit that equips marketers to tackle the challenges of this dynamic digital realm head-on. Furthermore, the unveiling of the next-generation CMS and Commerce roadmaps left me truly exhilarated. These roadmaps promise an integration of experimentation, personalization, and AI like never before, offering a glimpse into an exciting future for digital innovation.</p>
<h2>Optimizely One : The Marketing Operating System</h2>
<p>In the keynote, Alexander Atzberger, the CEO of Optimizely, unveiled the first major announcement of this edition: Optimizely one - the marketing operating system. With this offering, Optimizely is finally bringing all their product and tools under one unified system, that will allow marketing teams to work within the Optimizely ecosystem at every stage of content creation, from ideation, planning and publishing, to experimentation and personalization. It is clear that Optimizely continues to aim to simplify marketing work by allowing collaboration and iterations within a unified set of tools. Over are the days where the marketing team had to work with so many disjoint products that complexities the content creation and publishing process. With a flexible stack and composable architecture, Optimizely fully embraces a digital and modern approach to marketing.</p>
<p>To tie all of that together, Optimizely also introduced their own AI agent - <strong>Opal</strong> - embedded in the different tools, right when you need it, and available to help accelerate multiple tasks, such as providing insights, reviewing and creating new content.</p>
<p><img src="https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D5612AQGDgw7QM8JOZw/article-inline_image-shrink_1500_2232/0/1697645413305?e=1705536000&v=beta&t=NmRASQiV04q_KNaHBzXtQV5-EfUewtX9Krwc-pw3T5Y" /></p>
<p>­­> Read the press release here: <a href="https://www.optimizely.com/company/press/optimizely-one/">https://www.optimizely.com/company/press/optimizely-one/</a></p>
<h2>SaaS Core CMS</h2>
<p>Another major announcement was the introduction of SaaS Core CMS. While CMS has always been a PaaS-based solution, it is now available as a SaaS solution as well. The goal of Optimizely is to provide flexibility with their tools and to allow their customers to compose an architecture that makes sense with their business needs and ecosystem. For CMS, customers will now have the option to use a SaaS Core-based architecture - a headless solution by design - meaning that content is stored as pure data, abstract from the presentation layer. It is obviously version-less by default, and it automatically upgrades. It also means that it supports multiple integration options, such as pure headless, headless with head awareness, headless with presentation control, aggregated (external sources) and so on.</p>
<p><img src="https://www.optimizely.com/contentassets/00ac69bd399f46f0beef8d9561710a71/paas-or-saas.png" alt="Optimizely CMS PaaS vs. SaaS" /></p>
<p>Talking about the future of CMS, Optimizely also unveiled their all-new visual builder, much more "slick" and elegant, giving more power into the hands of the content creation team, allowing them to easily compose their page layouts. Optimizely also added an Experimentation tab right in the CMS - bringing both tools even closer, allowing the content creator to experiment, easier than ever, on different versions of their content, in order to choose the version that truly delivers results.</p>
<p><img src="https://www.optimizely.com/contentassets/00ac69bd399f46f0beef8d9561710a71/visual-builder.png" width="750" alt="Optimizely CMS Visual Editor preview" height="470" /></p>
<h2>Next Gen Personalized Commerce</h2>
<p>As I spent a lot of time helping our clients with their e-commerce implementation, I was truly excited to learn more about the roadmap of Optimizely Commerce products.</p>
<h3>New Promotion Engine</h3>
<p>One of the area, in my own opinion, where Optimizely Commerce is a bit behind is the Promotion engine and the administration screens for marketers and merchandisers to create new promotions. Well, it looks like Optimizely was aware, as they presented at Opticon the new Promotion engine. With much more flexibility, marketing teams will be able to create completely new promotions by using a rule (query) builder, eliminating the need to work with a developer every time a new type of promotion is required. There are also multiple new filters when navigating the list of promotions and campaigns. Sweet!<br /><br /><img src="/link/4ab105cb8c0a4cc6a1dc49988c496351.aspx" width="596" height="385" /> </p>
<h3>Google Partnerships</h3>
<p>Optimizely presented multiple new partnerships with Google throughout the Opticon sessions. For commerce, they are working on a new set of algorithms with Google to provide better <strong>Product Recommendations</strong>, as well as new AI-driven search engine for Optimizely Configured Commerce. Finally, they have also partnered with Google to provide many new translations for their Optimizely backend products.<br /><img src="/link/2eb6903797f34b53a14446ed6ffeb2df.aspx" /><br /><br />­> More details regarding this partnership here: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/optimizely-commerce-google-partner-unlock-innovation-josh-schoonmaker-ptruc/">https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/optimizely-commerce-google-partner-unlock-innovation-josh-schoonmaker-ptruc/</a></p>
<h3>Promotion Recommendations</h3>
<p>I have a feeling that this announcement didn't generate as much excitement as it should have, even though it might come a bit later in the future roadmap of the Commerce products. Optimizely unveiled new AI promotion recommendations, which is truly exciting and another great use of AI / MLS algorithms. Imagine, for retailers having tens or hundreds of promotions running at the same time on the site, or having complex promotions with hundreds of products applicable, we will be able to create a web experience where the best promotions, or the best products within the promotions, can be automatically recommended to the customer!</p>
<p><img src="/link/fb4561b0b57c4f9e8d5c78f1df383c4e.aspx" width="1078" height="569" /></p>
<p><img src="/link/99c85dec2a25441f87b1f9b3011f66e8.aspx" width="1078" height="534" /></p>
<h2>See you in 2024...</h2>
<p>Opticon is a great event to learn about the evolution of Optimizely products, the roadmaps, and the offering and positioning of the company's products. It's also a great opportunity to meet the community of practitioners, the clients, the partners and the employees, share ideas, learn and get some inspiration. As we were wrapping up the Opticon 2023 in San Diego, Optimizely announced that the 2024 Opticon will be held in... San Antonio, Texas!</p>
<p>See you next year!</p>
<p><img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/35/Texas_flag_map.svg/250px-Texas_flag_map.svg.png" /></p>2023-11-13T04:18:17.0000000ZBlog posteCommerce merchandising series: dynamic categories (B2C)<p>This is the 3rd post in my "eCommerce merchandising series", where I share some ideas and strategies that I had the chance to implement in my years working with B2C and B2B retailers on the Optimizely Commerce platform! Today, I'd like to share some thoughts on dynamic category pages, that is, category product pages that are updated dynamically in your product catalogue, based on rules, without manual intervention. The rules configured by the merchandising team will allow to determine what products will be displayed on those category pages.</p>
<p>A typical use case would be the brands category pages. For retailers having multiple brands, they will want to have the option to display category pages per brands, which is time consuming and low value to maintain manually. Those brand pages are usually outside of the main catalogue hierarchy (but might sometimes fall under a main category if it makes sense to showcase brands for a specifc category of products).</p>
<p>Another typical use case would be to display the newest products in a category page. Here, it can also make sense to display newest products under every main category.</p>
<p>While this is a core feature in Optimizely B2B Commerce, it's not yet the case in B2C Commerce, but hopefully will be added soon:) Nonetheless, most of our retail clients ends up having this type of requirement. Since the Optimizely B2C Commerce platform is quite extensible in that matter, we were able to build our own engine that allows to display showcase products in a category, based on rules created by the merchandising teams via the Commerce Catalogue UI. I'm sure there are many other ways to achieve this - don't hesitate to comment below ;) - but I wanted to share one approach here that worked out pretty well and that consists of (1) creating a block to configure the category rules, (2) extending the categories to allow merchandisers to stack multiple rules per category and (3) creating a schedule job to update the categories based on the rules.</p>
<p>Let's take a closer look, shall we.</p>
<h2>Dynamic Category Rules Block</h2>
<p><img src="/link/314510573f1747b1a189007040201750.aspx" /></p>
<p>This block is actually quite powerful and allows the merchandisers to create a dynamic category based on either an existing promotion (ex: "20% end of year sale") or based on existing product attributes. It also allows them to apply an uppder and lower inventory threshold, so that, for example, the dynamic category would discard products with inventory less than 10 units.</p>
<p>The "Promotion" section is a drop and down that exposes all active and future promotions configured in the Optimizely Marketing module. It's important to also display future promotions if we want to allow merchandisers to prepare the dynamic category ahead of a time, before a specific campaign kicks in.</p>
<p>The "Product attributes" is composed of 3 fields: </p>
<ol>
<li>Field Name: all product attributes are exposed in a dropdown. If your products are coming from an ERP or PIM, it's important to synch enough product attributes that will give the flexibility needed by the merchandisers to build their rules. Make sure to speak with them when creating the attributes!</li>
<li>Filter Operator: This operator can be "Equal", "Not equal", "In" , "Not In", "Contains" or "Not Contains" (note that we could easily think of other operators if there's such a need with your product attributes).</li>
<li>Filter Value: this is a simple text field.</li>
</ol>
<p>For example, if there's a Boolean product attribute called "New Arrivals", the rules would be: "New Arrivals" EQUALS "True"<br /><img src="/link/08a5fac2681d4639a07a6d56e2ef2bef.aspx" /></p>
<h2>Extending the commerce catalogue categories</h2>
<p>The Category page type in Optimizely B2C Commerce Catalogue has been extended to add a new section that we have called "Product Assignment". This allows the merchandising team to toggle on or off the dynamic assignment for this category, as well as to add their dynamic category rules block. They can then publish the page right away, or schedule it at a future time (ex: to publish at the same time as a campaign).</p>
<p><img src="/link/f17bf0782d944d7490ab26c5db66fd62.aspx" /></p>
<p>Bonus : to allow merchandisers to preview the rules, we made sure that they could use the native "Preview" feature of the Optimizely. The "Preview" feature will render the category page using the rules in the category, even though the page is not published yet, allowing to preview what it will look like.</p>
<h2>Scheduled Job</h2>
<p>Finally, we created a scheduled job to automatically refresh the dynamic categories at a specific interval. This typically runs after a product import or synch from the ERP, and update the assignation of products to the dynamic categories, so that the products are displayed on the front-end as well as in the commerce catalogue.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>Voilà! It's that simple :) From a site visitor perspective, on the website, dynamic categories and regular categories just look the same. This is a tool to help maintain the product catalogue and to give the flexibility to the merchandising teams to create their own dynamic category rules.<br />Let me know in the comments what you think of this solution, and how you would typically solve this kind of challenge.</p>
<p><em>>> Don't miss out my other blog posts in this serie:</em></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="/link/88d076002dc94a80823f2955ca36e408.aspx">eCommerce merchandising series: categories product sequencing</a></li>
<li><a href="/link/84052ecff9454ecc8ee4feca35690bde.aspx">eCommerce merchandising series: product flags merchandising experience</a></li>
</ul>2022-02-02T04:51:14.0000000ZBlog posteCommerce merchandising series: product flags merchandising experience<p>This is the 2nd post in my "eCommerce merchandising series", where I share ideas and strategies that I had the chance to implement in my years working with B2C and B2B retailers on the Optimizely Commerce platform! Today, let's take a look at product flags, or product badges, that are commonly used in retail to promote products within your eCommerce store.</p>
<p>Product flags are used to highlight specific attributes to customers, that generally lead to more interest, add-to-cart, conversions, sales, and so on. They <strong>boost sales </strong>by promoting the urgency to purchase. They guide and motivate customers to persue with looking at this item.</p>
<p><img src="/link/9fe9f388ffe64c24a756c7a9682415be.aspx" width="819" alt="product flags on walmart.com eCommerce store" height="439" /></p>
<p>Just look on your favorite eCommerce store and you'll see plenty of examples: New Products, On Sale, Christmas Sale, Boxing Day, Closeout, Back in stock, Favorites, Best Sellers, Deal of the day / Limited Stocks / Limited edition (urgency!)</p>
<p>But how do you implement those? Furthermore, how do you allow your merchandisers to easily control, create and modify them from within your Optimizely Commerce platform?</p>
<h2>Based on Product Attributes</h2>
<p>One the most common and easiest way to manage your flags / badges is to leverage your current product attributes, and display static flags based on your attributes. Want to display "New product"?, then add a boolean attribute "New arrival" , and let your merchandisers manage this attribute, either within the eCommerce platform, or in the ERP (assuming it's synched with your eCommerce). Want to give them more control, display a flag based on a specific campaign, or allowing them to modify the rendering of the flags? You may want to extend this functionality...</p>
<h2>Let the merchandisers manage the rules (and the display settings)</h2>
<p>Recently, we developed additional features on the Optimizely B2C Commerce and CMS to allow our merchandisers to manage rules that define where the product flags would be displayed in the product catalogue, as well as to manage how the flags would be displayed. Of course, we didn't give them full access to the CSS, but we surfaced some of the parameters that would give them control on the display settings, such as the text color, background color, background image and opacity. This gives a lot of flexibility to the merchandising teams to control WHERE (on what product tiles) the flags are dispalyed, but also to control HOW the flags / badges are displayed, without the need of having a developer coding new rules or flags. We wanted to give them just enough control, so that they can use their creativity in upcoming campaigns, but didn't want to let them break the site. I think we found the sweet spot by allowing them to control just enough display parameters. Plus, they are using the same tools (pages, content areas and blocks) that they are already familiar with in Optimizely Commerce.</p>
<p><img src="/link/a9e2711b48174958aaaf2d5369c3b2d0.aspx" /></p>
<p><img src="/link/fd8185946c264c9eb83309478bfc0ad4.aspx" /></p>
<h3><img src="/link/bee3a22acd404b9f93842c8ff2767341.aspx" /></h3>
<h3>Other dimensions</h3>
<p>Defining rules based on product attributes is great, but other dimensions must be taken into consideration as well, when creating relevant product flags, such as stock inventory ("Back in stock" , "Low stock", "out of stock" badges), or promotions ("On sales", "Chrismtas sale", "Save x$", BOGO, Free Shipping, etc.). This can be easily exposed to the merchandisers, in the UI where they create their custom rules. Make sure to understand the type of campaigns your merchandisers want to create, based on your industry and customers base, so that you can expose all the information that they will need to build their rules!</p>
<h2>Preview the display of your flags</h2>
<p>There are many different ways to implement that type of feature, but it's always a big win if you are able to leverage the platform's strenghts, and capabilities that the commerce team is already familiar with. In our case, the merchandisers are able to create as many product flags are they want, by creating new "flag details" page. Since those are CMS pages, we were able to define and display a preview of what the flag will look like, based on the parameters configured by the Merchandiser. This is extremly useful, and uses and leverage the capabilities of the platform:</p>
<p><img src="/link/32525b62cae84a92988cce11917a6227.aspx" /></p>
<h2></h2>
<h2>Summary</h2>
<p>Talk to your marketing and merchandising teams. Understand the type of strategies that will increase sales and conversions on your eCommerce store, and how you can help them to build this. Make sure that they can easily configure the product flags (badges) to effectively execute those strategies. When executed properly, product flags can really boost your conversions, and your sales. By combining them, your store will really foster customer loyalty, having this sense of ermengecy that will keep your customers coming back... while having your products even more easily discovered!</p>
<p>I'd be curious to hear about your experiences on allowing your internal marketing and merchanising teams to manage the product flags. What are your biggest challenge?</p>
<p><em>>> Don't miss out my other blog posts in this serie:</em></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="/link/88d076002dc94a80823f2955ca36e408.aspx">eCommerce merchandising series: categories product sequencing</a></li>
<li><a href="/link/7344f6ea3c3d49cc9f916716a5b2cf3f.aspx">eCommerce merchandising series: dynamic categories (B2C)</a></li>
</ul>2021-12-17T06:27:42.0000000ZBlog posteCommerce merchandising series: categories product sequencing<p>Helping top retailers <span>transitioning </span>to eCommerce has proven to be very challenging. As we are helping them navigate through all the difficulties of bringing their brand online, we have developed quite a few tools to help retailers to merchandise their products online efficiently. </p>
<p>This is the first post of a series where I'll share some strategies we have put in place, as well as customizations we have made to the Optimizely B2C platform, to help merchandisers improving their eCommerce experience and conversions.</p>
<p>As defined by <a href="https://www.apptus.com/blog/ecommerce-merchandising/">Apptus</a>, "'<em>commerce merchandising is both a science and an art. Its goal is to boost sales, by connecting shoppers with the right products. The most important function of eCommerce merchandising is to guide users through their customer journeys. Compared to physical stores, the customer journey is more complex when it comes to eCommerce. Nearly every visitor in brick-and mortar shops will interact with the same visuals, smells and associates while they walk into the stores. At the same time, there are many different paths that a customer can take to end up on your eCommerce site. Ecommerce merchandising can help you ensure that every customer who visits your site has a similar experience, no matter how they arrive on your site and how they navigate once they get there</em>."</p>
<p>When it comes to category merchandising, the goal is to optimize the sequence (order) of your product in a category or product listing page, to get the most clicks and conversions, and to allow customers to discover products that will be the most relevant to them. The initial sort order of the products in the category is therefore essential in achieving this objective. </p>
<p>However, every retailer will want to adopt a strategy that is tailored to their industry, customer needs, product catalogue depth and type of products. For example, fast fashion retailers - where catalogues and collections change every few months - may want to put more emphasis on the sequencing of products based on clothing attributes that are the most popular, such as the color, or boost newest items/collections first.</p>
<p>Every customer has different taste, and different shopping habits. While creating personas may have help to identify the different types of customers, those are only very broad. When it comes to category merchandising and default sorting option, one of the most effective strategy is to use personalization and A/I machine learning, with a service such as <span><a href="/link/17595d656a2a46c5834814ee14d5f1fd.aspx">Optimizely Personalized Search & Navigation</a>, to sequence the products differently for every customer, based on their search, discovery and purchasing patterns. </span></p>
<h2>Product sequencing manual rules</h2>
<p>While A/I and machine learning is a great way to get higher conversions at a low maintenance cost, some retailers may want to interfere and have much more control on the order in which the products are displayed in the catalogues, so that it's alligned with the overall website merchandising strategy. For example, in the fashion industry, retailers will definitely release a new winter or Christmas collection early November, and will want most of their top categories to reflect the winter/Christmas spirit of the overall website. It also reflects what their customers are looking for at this time of the year: Christmas gifts, winter clothes, etc. To acheive this objective, retailers will want to be able to showcase automatically the newest Christmas collections and, on Black Friday weekend, to boost the items that are on sale.</p>
<p>When there's thousands of items in the product catalogue, manually sorting and boosting items may not be a viable option, therefore we have created new tools in Episerver Commerce that allow contributors to configure automated rules for the sequencing of products within a category.</p>
<p>At the category level, merchandisers do have access to a new tab "Product Sequencing" where they can drag and drop product sequencing rules inside a content area in order to stack them.</p>
<p><img src="/link/84d5cd3840164bf594c05196776a2de5.aspx" /></p>
<p>The "product sequencing rules" is simply a new type of block that allow contributor to configure rules by (1) selecting any product attribute, (2) selecting an operator (such as equal), (3) input a value, and (4) choosing a sort by option to sort the search result set (based on stock, or latest arrivals). We are obviously using Optimizely Search & Nav here.</p>
<p><img src="/link/661729f6983540d3a36ad637f8ad16f9.aspx" /></p>
<p><img src="/link/a40be18d30d84765a68fc629974f9c5f.aspx" /></p>
<p>By stacking multiple "product sequencing" blocks, the merchandisers can control dynamically the order sequencing of products within a category, and this sequence will always be up to date even when new products and collections are sync to the platform.</p>
<p>Ex: of rules that they could create and stack:</p>
<ol>
<li>Display Chrstimas collection items first, order by price</li>
<li>From the remaining items, display in this sequence:
<ol>
<li>Display Bundles items</li>
<li>Display white items with a special feature 'X'</li>
<li>Display red items with a special feature 'Y'</li>
</ol>
</li>
</ol>
<p>Obviously, the attributes and rules will depend on your catalogue and business logic, therefore it's important to understand how the retailer merchnadise and operate.</p>
<p>As you can see in this example, eCommerce merchanidising is somewhat similar to brick and mortal store merchandising. As customer are walking into a store, sales, best sellers, and seasonal products are presented upfront.</p>
<p>Note that a Scheduled Job runs periodically to update the default sorting based on the rules.</p>
<h2>Traditional approaches</h2>
<p>Obviously, traditional approaches may still be what works the best with your customers. For example, in some industries, customers are still looking mostly for the "best sellers" items, and that highly influence what they buy. In this case, boosting the best sellers makes more sense. In other industries, customers are hunting for deals, therefore displaying the "on sale" items first may be the way go get the highest conversions. Which brings me to my last point...</p>
<h2>Experiment</h2>
<p>Not sure what works the best for your customers yet? The idea will be to experiment with different features - different type of default sorting in your categories, to choose the sequencing that converts the most!</p>
<p>There are many other ways to improve category merchandising, I would love to hear from the community what type of strategies you have put in place with your clients!</p>
<p>Come back in 2 weeks for a new blog post in this e-merchandising series.</p>
<p><em>>> Don't miss out my other blog posts in this serie:</em></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="/link/7344f6ea3c3d49cc9f916716a5b2cf3f.aspx">eCommerce merchandising series: dynamic categories (B2C)</a></li>
<li><a href="/link/84052ecff9454ecc8ee4feca35690bde.aspx">eCommerce merchandising series: product flags merchandising experience</a></li>
</ul>2021-11-19T06:13:16.0000000ZBlog post3 tips to help your team learn and grow with the Optimizely platform<p>Leading a team of highly motivated eCommerce digital strategists is an exciting challenge. From day one, one of my goals was to help the team learn and grow by staying up to date and ready to help our customers with their digital challenges. Working as consultants, one of our biggest challenges is time... how do we find time to learn, while delivering successful projects that mobilize most of the teams for months? Keep reading for some advice on how to get your team up to date on the Optimizely Platform and digital strategies.</p>
<h2>#1. Use the power of the team to build a learning program</h2>
<p>Not everyone has time to attend all conferences, watch webinars, read the latest blog post, attend product roadmaps presentation, etc. By using the power of your team, you can elevate all team members knowledge. One strategy is to define champions for every competency that your team wants to foster. These leaders will be responsible to monitor all learning activities (such as webinars, conferences, articles, blog posts, roadmap presentations, new features, etc.) and share the learning with the whole team in weekly or monthly knowledge sharing session. They will also be the refence if a new or an existing employee wants to get more knowledge on a specific competency.</p>
<p>There are many ways to divide the different competencies between your champions. For example, you may want to have champions for every Optimizely product that are relevant for your company, such as CMS, Commerce B2C, Commerce B2B, Personalization, Marketing Automation, A/B testing, etc, and have other champions focusing on broader competencies and expertise areas, such as Analytics, Reporting, Optimization, Loyalty, Payment, Web Accessibility, Privacy, etc.</p>
<p>You will want to review the competencies list every year to make sure it's still aligned with your company/department’s objectives and upcoming initiatives, as well as shuffle your champions once in a while to get everybody moving, learning and motivated. </p>
<h2>#2. Lunch and learn</h2>
<p>The idea is not new, but one of the most effective to share learning across the team. Lunch and learn are a great way to keep your team learning while making it fun. In our case, one team member is responsible to maintain an agenda of upcoming lunch and learn presentations and make sure that people are booked and prepared. The range of topics is very broad, but it tends to be in one of these categories: new features demo, product/project demo, summary of webinars/conferences, SME/Expert talk, lesson's learned, or innovations.</p>
<p>Here's a few tips to get your lunch and learn effectives:</p>
<ul>
<li>Planification is the key. Make sure there's a roadmap of topics coming ahead and shared with the team members.</li>
<li>Keep them short but effective and focused. People may want to keep a few minutes to go out or leave their computer on the lunch time, so make sure not to use the full hour. People attention also tends to decrease after 20 minutes. Think Ted Talk!</li>
<li>To keep them fun, try to order lunch for attendance (or have lunches delivered at home for those who still work from home), and make sure to keep a few minutes at the beginning for the typical informal conversations. Think team building!</li>
<li>It can be a good idea to open lunch and learn to a broader audience inside your organization. This can help your team getting exposed to other teams and stakeholders, while enabling knowledge sharing across the whole company.</li>
<li>Record the presentations and have them accessible for whoever was not able to attend. You can share those videos on your intranet or platforms such as Microsoft Streams or SharePoint. After only a few months, you will have built a great library where your people can go look for information and knowledge, filtered by topics and expertise.</li>
</ul>
<h2>#3. Weekly lesson's learned </h2>
<p>One of the most powerful tools we have is extremely simple but so efficient. Since not all team members are working on the same projects/initiatives, we meet every week and, one after the other, we simply answer the following question: what's the one thing I’ve learn this week?</p>
<p>Surprisingly enough (or not), people always come, week after week, with one true lesson learned, and help the whole team beneficiate from this learning, may it be related to a feature, an option from the platform that they discovered last week, a soft skill or anything related to any competency. It's amazing to see how everyone in the team appreciate this moment where they can learn and often avoid the same errors or time lost as their colleagues experienced. </p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>Working in digital and eCommerce is fun, and one part of this is because the technologies, customer needs and expectations are growing faster every year. To deliver the best services, we must stay up to date and continue to learn every day. By involving your team process, not only are you helping them to the path to success, but you are also building a sense of community and sharing within the team and across the company. With all the digital challenges coming up, this will be much needed and will be a differentiator for your team and your organization!</p>
<p><strong>And now, I'd be very curious to hear from you - how do you stay up to date? How's your team and organization sharing their knowledge?</strong></p>
<h2>Bonus: some resources to learn</h2>
<p>Here's a few resources to get started. This is just the beginning!</p>
<ul>
<li>Monitor and attend Optimizely webinars and events: <a href="https://www.optimizely.com/insights/events/">https://www.optimizely.com/insights/events/</a></li>
<li>Seek insights by reading Optimizely blog posts: <a href="https://www.optimizely.com/insights/blog/">https://www.optimizely.com/insights/blog/</a> </li>
<li>Find and read blog posts from the Optimizely community that are relevant to your competencies: <a href="/link/bccc323fc15e45259d7a934d1efb5d52.aspx">https://world.optimizely.com/blogs/</a> </li>
<li>Watch Opticon conferences: <a href="https://www.optimizely.com/insights/opticon/">https://www.optimizely.com/insights/opticon/</a></li>
<li>Read latest UX articles from NNG : <a href="https://www.nngroup.com/articles/">https://www.nngroup.com/articles/</a> </li>
<li>Read the latest eCommerce UX articles from Baymard institute: <a href="https://baymard.com/blog">https://baymard.com/blog</a> </li>
</ul>
<p> </p>2021-11-03T04:53:21.0000000ZBlog post