Bringing Product and Marketing Teams Together By Kathryn Corrick and Frank Wales

In this ProductTank London talk, Kathryn Corrick and Frank Wales, Founding Partners at Corrick, Wales & Partners, tell us how product and marketing teams can both use data protection to solve problems.

Watch the video to see their talk in full. Or read on for an overview of their key points:

• What do they really want
• Cookies to solve two problems
• Data protection by design

What do They Really Want

Kathryn and Frank help organizations of various sizes to implement data protection and privacy solutions. However, different teams, whether product or marketing, want different things and need types of data. Product teams want to know how the product is performing. Where are users going on the website or platform? Are users doing what was intended?

Marketing teams, on the other hand, want to know are metrics going up? Are there more sales?

Cookies to Solve Two Problems

Currently, cookies are being used as a single technical implementation to solve two different kinds of problems. Companies are wondering how can we have better data for the marketing side? Product teams wonder, how do we use data to improve the product?

Unfortunately, regulations are dictating how cookies are set up and no one is happy, product, marketing nor the customer. Sometimes as product people, we forget that we’re customers too. Kathryn and Frank pose a question to the audience about how many people had product tested the cookie manager on their website. Not many product teams actually test this item. Collecting cookie data is an interesting conundrum. Teams want the data from customers, but as customers ourselves we block things like cookies while browsing the internet and then don’t test customer experience as product people.

Data Protection by Design

With continued regulations, data protection will be done by design and default. It won’t just be the job of legal or compliance but will become part of how teams work on a day to day basis. Agile focuses on speed but data protection and privacy require taking time to consider how things can be exploited. How to fix? There will be a shift in how teams work and there are already examples of this happening.

The key takeaway from this talk is that data protection and privacy will provide opportunities for product people to re-engage their relationships with the customer.