Growing pains are for adolescents, not enterprises.
Adding more customers, onboarding new hires, expanding into new locations — these should all be positive outcomes of a successful strategy.
Unfortunately, growth often exposes where your organizational resources (including your tech stack) are overstretched, prone to failure, or limited.
Scaling your business requires passing a series of stress tests. The earlier you recognize what they are and start planning for them, the better:
1. The peak performance moments of truth
Maybe you’re about to launch a new website. Maybe it’s one of those times of the year when everyone seems to visit your website.
In both cases, your reputation depends on whether you can deliver the quality experience they expect: fast page loads and zero downtime.
Traffic alone isn’t the reason failures happen. Many websites are running without proper analysis of performance patterns and rely on asking (and then paying) providers for additional service space.
AdWeek shows how thinking ahead enabled its website to handle a surge as marketers flocked to its Super Bowl coverage.
Steal this approach whether you’re contending with online holiday shoppers, a flood of virtual event attendees, or other high-stakes events.
2. The workflow faultline fractures
Collaboration starts to look a lot different as you add more stakeholders and the sheer volume of work begins to pile up.
It’s easy for communication to break down and deadlines to get missed as individuals and teams try to clarify reviews, approvals, and other stages of publishing content.
Scaling should lead to more fluid handoffs rather than creating bottlenecks, confusion, and errors. That’s what makes collaborative editing a critical new way of working within large enterprises.
Learn how this works in practice and how it drives natural, more productive workflows and greater confidence across organizations.
3. Accessibility governance gone wrong
Standards only work if they’re widely understood and consistently applied, but that’s easier said than done when you’re growing at a rapid pace.
How do you ensure teams split across offices or entire continents understand who owns areas like accessibility, what your practices entail, and how to apply them?
Poor governance means your organization could run afoul of accessibility compliance requirements, leading to expensive fixes.
The good news is that it’s possible to keep on track, no matter how fast you’re scaling.
We asked, you answered
In our last issue of The Brief, we explored the risks you don’t see until it’s too late.
We highlighted four common examples and asked you to rank them. The results shed some new light on where digital teams need to keep their eyes open:
50% say third-party tools & integrations are their biggest hidden tech risk.
This was followed by:
- Access/permissions: 33%
- Platform/architecture: 17%
No one chose custom workflows/workarounds, suggesting that most people recognize those kinds of risks going into a project.
Of course, some integrations can be deployed with greater confidence than others. ICYMI, see our post on the latest WordPress AI plugins, which includes a checklist you can use to improve your governance.
News in brief, summarized by The Brief:
Publishers take note: Google this week announced it would roll out new generative AI features in its core search product that would go beyond offering links and include conversational follow-ups directly in results.
Here’s what media organizations need to know:
- Paywalled content is becoming more prominent: Google’s AI will label content from paid subscriptions. Now is the time to integrate with Google’s Subscription Linking Tool if you want to benefit from additional clicks.
- Citation opportunities are expanding: Much like publishers often recommend additional articles at the end of big stories, Google will now append summaries and answer with links to sources for more in-depth coverage. Make sure you understand AEO and the art of getting discovered.
- Community sources will get curated: Expect to see your content cited alongside previews from social media, Reddit, and other online forums. Your audience will consume your work alongside a diverse set of voices.