“We Take Pride in How Deeply We Get To Know Our Clients, Their Business, What Challenges They’re Facing and Their Metrics for Success.”
Please tell us about your role and the technology you handle at Avionos.
At Avionos, I’m responsible for delivering measurable business outcomes for our clients. This includes building teams and developing our talent, advancing processes and methods for a full set of service offerings across the digital commerce and marketing space and ensuring governance for risk mitigation and the successful delivery of our services.
We work with industry-leading partners including Salesforce, Adobe, Magento, Marketo, Bloomreach, Acquia, Mulesoft and Salsify. Beyond that, Avionos is proud to be a Gold Level partner with Adobe and a Silver Level partner with Salesforce.
How did your role evolve through the pandemic months? As a COO, how did you stay on top of your business strategy? What adjustments did you make to ensure you are able to cope with the situation?
The pandemic presented an opportunity for Avionos. Many B2B companies needed a commerce solution and craved the ability to conduct business virtually as they no longer had their sales representatives making sales calls and physical locations were unavailable to their teams. We adapted to their needs by creating commerce offerings at multiple levels. One new offering that was popular and filled the need for many businesses was our Quick Start offering which gave businesses the ability to create a storefront and get it up and running quickly to pivot their transactions to the online space. In a time when businesses were rethinking their models and budgets, we were able to give them options to adapt to the changing situation effectively and efficiently.
We also had to rework our methodology to ensure we had different ways of delivering our services to our clients. While we had complex custom projects that required deep strategy and discovery, we also had to come up with ways to rapidly deliver simpler solutions in a repeatable way without a lot of the typical customization that increases timelines and budgets. These are very different project types with alternate ways of delivering and working with clients. For this reason, we had to develop a more streamlined approach that taught our teams how to control projects to enable clients to achieve their goal of quickly running a solid commerce solution.
Tell us more about your remote working technology stack and how has it evolved in the last 2-3 years?
With offices in both the U.S. and Bogota, Colombia, Avionos was already ahead of the curve when it came to working with teams in multiple locations and time zones. Before COVID-19, we were able to operate through a hybrid model with flexible scheduling and teams working both in the office and remotely, which positioned us well to shift to full remote work during the pandemic.
We’ve been using Microsoft Teams, Sharepoint, and Zoom for communication and file sharing as well as Atlassian for knowledge sharing and project workflows. Another tool we often use is Miro, which enables collaboration and virtual whiteboarding. All of these tools have been in our tech stack for years, so it wasn’t as much of a learning curve for our employees as we transitioned to operate remotely.
Marketing and sales are big contributors to digital transformation journeys. How does Avionos support its customers to create an agile digital transformation roadmap? What are the biggest lessons you have learned in working with your customers?
At Avionos, we take pride in how deeply we get to know our clients, their business, what challenges they’re facing and their metrics for success. Our digital maturity model helps us assess where our clients are and where they need to be to achieve their goals and create an agile digital transformation roadmap.
One of the biggest things we teach our teams is to not just take orders. We are partners to our clients who help them see the whole landscape and potential of what they can do, what their competitors are doing and what their competitors haven’t thought of that they need to be thinking of. We are the experts in the digital space and clients look to us to guide them. What I’ve learned from working with them is to not take what they are asking for at face value as the answer. My goal is to question it, challenge it and use the information they share to make a recommendation, which sometimes might be different from what they had originally asked for.
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What are your predictions on the future of digital commerce companies that are sustaining on WFH and working-from-anywhere models?
Location matters less now, and we’ve proved that we can bring together teams from all over the country and world to successfully deliver and produce great work for our clients. While this distributed workforce will likely stick around long-term, there is a risk of losing the collaboration and creative thinking that comes organically from casual in-person conversations. It’s more difficult to develop relationships with teammates, which is one of the key factors in the successful delivery of our services.
I predict companies will invest more in travel for teams to come together at key times, it is needed to ensure exceptional thinking and high-quality work and to protect culture and encourage collaboration. This could take the form of project kickoff meetings, major project milestones and company-wide events.
Tell us more about the hiring trends in the tech industry. What kind of talent / skills do you hire for in your company?
Being able to recognize raw talent and know what to do with it is critical to hiring in the tech industry. When rapid growth is occurring, the luxury of waiting to find candidates with the exact profile you are seeking isn’t always granted to hiring professionals. Instead, finding candidates who have the core elements needed and are motivated to learn and adapt as they go is the way you need to be thinking.
At the junior levels, we look for core skills and train our teams to be able to work on a variety of platforms and domains. We have an excellent college hire program and strong training programs in all of our core technologies. Having employees with versatile skills also enables us to be highly flexible with staffing.
Read More: ITechnology Interview with Edward Barrow, VP Product Strategy at Optimizely
Tag a person from the industry whose answers you would like to see here:
Gibson Smith, Chief People Officer at Avionos
Thank you, Victoria! That was fun and we hope to see you back on itechnologyseries.com soon.
[To participate in our interview series, please write to us at sghosh@martechseries.com]
As Chief Operating Officer, Victoria is responsible for successful outcomes based delivery, with a focus on creating tools and processes for delivering high quality client work and bringing the best teams together for clients.
With over 20 years of delivery management and business operations experience, Victoria specializes in orchestrating the successful delivery of complex initiatives. Victoria has led delivery across multiple agencies for clients in the retail, CPG and financial services space, establishing the project management discipline and creating effective processes for digital development. She completed her BA at Northwestern University and holds a PMP certification.
Avionos designs and implements digital commerce and marketing solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes for clients like Kellogg’s, Brunswick, JLL and CSA Group. Our iterative approach quickly unlocks new revenue, transforms customer experiences and drives customer engagement. We’re ranked on the 2019 and 2020 Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies list, Crain’s 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 Best Places to Work in Chicago lists, included on Comparably’s 2018 Best Company Culture List and certified as a Great Place to Work.
