Do you want to structure a website strategy team? Most companies either have one person responsible for website strategy or outsource this work.

However, as your company expands, you might find that it becomes too much for such one person to build your entire strategy, track your website performance, be ready with an alternative plan or make it cheaper to do in-house.

People are the most valuable and important asset and resource for any company, and websites are no exception. 

It’s said to hire good people who will be your company’s backbone. They will generally find innovative and clever ways to earn maximum bang for your buck. 

Despite all their hard work, more energy and thought often go into bringing a new CMS system than supporting a qualified website team. 

At this point, you need a website strategy team. 

However, there is a new challenge; understanding the ideal structure— similar to working out the talented hierarchy for any other department. 

You need a plan to attract the best-fit candidates.

So, what does your website strategy team need? What are the steps to build your team? How do you structure it to support your overall marketing strategy and other stakeholders?  

While local considerations like internal politics, company culture, and values can influence how you can stature a website strategy team, this piece will provide valuable insights.

We will explore the configuration of a typical team, including the structure, leadership, staffing system, skills and responsibilities it requires.

Key Roles: How to Structure a Website Strategy Team 

Before we lay out the tips on how to structure a web strategy team, let’s go through the key responsibilities to give you an idea of who undertakes what on a web project.

Yet bear in mind that this is just a simple description. But in real life, some roles may overlap between positions based on the team composition and volume and your business scale.  

• Business Analyst 

Main Tasks:

1. Document, gather, and communicate functional requirements
2. Analyse the market, best benefits, competition, and audience
3. Define opportunities and challenges
4. Understand business objectives and turn them into project requirements
5. Manage communication between stakeholders

Business analyst (BA) ties business and technology. Essentially, a BA’s primary role is to understand what exactly you want to communicate this idea to the tech team.

They build their strategies based on analysing data. And it goes way beyond drafting requirements and asking questions, even though BA do that a lot.

But one of the main goals of business analysts on your website project is to figure out how you can reach your business goals using the right technology tool. Also, it should consider a wide range of variables— such as your market, organisational structure, audience, resources, the current state of technology, budget and competition. 

Then BA will communicate, establish and convey this vision in an easy-to-grasp strategy, including specifications, briefs, proposals, and presentations to managers and the tech team.

This structured form can be used at any stage, not only at the project launch.

First and forest, BA is a communicator who plays a significant role in a long-term product-driven project. Also, they can add their recommendations.

For instance, a dedicated BA in a web development project constantly monitors how a product performs from a business perspective, what the rivals are doing, and what’s happening in the market.  

All this direction helps a qualified BA figure out gaps and room for adjustment and improvement and better understand what next steps to take to stand out and keep your product on top.

Core Skills

1. Fluency in all main business analysis techniques 
2. Project management tools
3. Visualisation tools and business data analytics
4. Outstanding communication and interpersonal skills. 

One more thing; On small website projects, the responsibilities of a business analyst are often taken by a trained Purchase Order or Project Manager who oversees the business aspect of product development. 

• Business Strategist 

Main Tasks:

1. Create marketing strategies that incorporate messaging, branding, pricing, positioning, and distribution channels to achieve business goals
2. Develop a company’s culture and corporate identity by creating mission and values statements and strategic plans
3. Conduct market research to understand competitors and spot opportunities for growth within the existing marketplace or identification of new markets to penetrate
4. Develop new business opportunities matching a web project by researching trends, finding gaps in the industry, identifying potential markets, and understanding customer needs
5. Consult with management to achieve their business objectives

A website strategy team should evolve a business strategist who will help in different scops. A professional strategist will help your team develop operational plans to ensure effective and efficient use of organisation resources while achieving business objectives and improving profitability. 

They work on long-term goals taking into their consideration your organisation’s resources and how to create the best of them.

Thus, they develop and implement a strategic plan that aligns with a website layout and organisational goals. Additionally, they measure the success of business strategies through website KPIs and define metrics such as customer satisfaction, revenue growth, and employee retention rates.

Business strategists also analyse existing strategies and practices and find better approaches and new tactics for product development.  

Talented strategists will help you identify environmental factors that could influence the corporate’s ability to attain its goals, recommend solutions for forecasted challenges, and mitigate risks. They can draw a direction, motivate staff to complete a website project, and prepare presentations to stakeholders, corporate investors, and clients.

Hiring a business strategist in your website strategy team will enhance efficiency by bridging management and your staff and reviewing your site performance.

Core Skills

1. Strong leadership skills to develop strategies for creating creative solutions
2. Contributing to digital innovation and business development 
3. Strategic thinking to develop plans for business growth
4. Keeping updated with industry trends and consumer behaviour 
5. Analytical skills to evaluate data and make informed decisions 

• Project Manager 

Main Tasks:

1. Collect and analyse requirements and manage any changing requirement
2. Enable effective team communication, performance, and conduct meetings
3. Plan an estimated timeframe, create a project roadmap, and follow any progress
4. Communicate with major stakeholders (Director of engineering, business owners, marketing executives)  
5. Oversee the entire project and divide tasks among team members according to their skills and experience

The project manager entails a more traditional management role. They should fit nearly any type of project.  

The ultimate goal of every PM is to monitor the entire team and ensure that the job is accomplished by disturbing tasks, creating plans, and managing changing requirements and scope.

Plus, a professional project manager needs to step up a communication framework and oversee progress. Finally, as we mentioned, qualified PMs usually take a business analyst’s role on small-scale business projects to meet all business requirements. 

Core Skills:

1. Project management and reporting tools
2. Recommend approaches to improve user experience 
3. A developing background
4. Utmost communication, interpersonal, and organisational skills
5. Data visualisation and analytics tools

• Software Engineer

Main Tasks:

1. Improve existing and develop new functionality depending on specifications
2.  Write, support, debug, and refactor code
3. Develop and support integrations with other parties’ services 
4. Evaluate the software and systems to keep your digital asset protected 
5. Software development, simulation, modelling, testing, and quality assurance

Another IT should be in your consideration when structuring a website strategy team. This is a person who is in charge of testing your website and ensuring it works smoothly. Also, a quality assurance engineer can undertake this job.

Indeed, the software developer is the first role you should think of when building your development team.

If you’re working on a big website project, you might rope other testers to work with a website strategy team.

Engineers will test your website across various devices and browsers to ensure you’re not losing customers just because your website doesn’t work perfectly on Chrome or whatever.

After all, the developer usually makes up the most significant part of a team. And please note that there are three roles you need to look into when searching for web development services.

Frontend Developer: works on a web application taking over visual design and prototypes implemented by a UX/UI designer to create a user-facing interface (web pages) and ensure they are responsive on all devices and browsers.

That’s why the very minimum set of tech skills for frontend developers are JavaScript, HTML/CSS, TypeScript, platforms, and other modern functional frontend frameworks to create interactive, scalable applications. 

Backend Developer: writes server-side code and works with databases, backend logic, and web application infrastructure. This role requires different tech skills (Python, Java, Node, Go, etc.), cloud services experience, deployment practices, and data management solutions.

Full-Stack Developer: should be fluent in both frontend and backend technologies. Yet, they can effectively develop a web application with a professionally and highly-interactive complex backend and data-instance frontend.

Engaging a full-stack developer in your website strategy team will help you use frontend frameworks to develop complex interfaces and do backend and database programming. 

Important: Bringing a full-stack developer will give you an edge as you can leverage more skills and experience with a smaller team. 

Core Skills:

1. Databases, infrastructure tools, and could services
2. Experience with modern web development platforms, frameworks, tools, and programming languages
3. Agile development practices
4. Take advantage of modelling deployment tools and engineering practises
5. Object-oriented analysis 

• Designer 

Main Tasks:

1. Visualise interactions and develop user experience
2. Create visual design and come up with a design system for the website
3. Test and validate several design solutions
4. Develop information and architect and layout a website
5. Communicate design to major stakeholders and a tech team

Unfortunately, almost all small business owners don’t consider UX/UI designers in a website strategy team. But please don’t neglect this part. They will be super beneficial in working on how your site looks and feels. Obviously, they are an essential part of any website strategy team. 

As a general rule of thumb, a talented user-experience designer makes your website outstanding (or care, well, a website can’t be caring, but…). 

A designer requires a mixture of coding, graphic design, UX/UI design, UX expertise, product design and, of course, marketing. It’s the designer that helps you have a website that will actually sell products and build your brand. Then developers ensure it stays up. 

Web design roles are performed by several IT specialists depending on the project type. Of course, you don’t hire all those professionals. But you can stick with the UX designer. If only because this position accumulates more or less all developing-related design tasks.

Instead, you can find marketing agency services to establish a plan that works for your specific project.

If you want to translate the name of this role, you will understand that a UX/UI designer establishes user experience (UX) and user interface (UI).

But in the real world, there is nothing simple about this position. Designers shape your web product based on the data and requirements gathered by the strategist and BA and their research.   

The designer makes your website sing.

Thus, a well-structured design requires a substantial understanding of your target audience and business. And a really good designer fights the temptation to do what is fashionable right now.

Furthermore, designers follow a consistent website design process that always beings with the target audience, market, and competition analysis. Using these outcomes combined with project requirements and business goals, designers outline user personas (who uses the website).

Then you can work on developing an information architecture (how content will be organised and structured on every web page/screen), define scenarios (how site visitors will navigate and interact with a web system), and, yes, build the interface of the future system.

Always take advantage of prototyping tools and wireframes (how every single page/element/ screen will look and perform). 

Core Skills:

1. Fluency in user-centred design concepts and techniques
2. Analytical and communication skills
3. Basic foundations to understand frontend development such as CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
4. Wireframing, graphic design, and prototyping tools such as Photoshop, Figma, and Marvel.
5. Discipline to help in productivity aligning with deadlines

• Content Director

Main Tasks:

1. Implement a content strategy aligned with business goals
2. Deliver high-quality content aligned with branding concept and production 
3. Work with a range of digital formats 
4. Partner with other teams in developing, data, and marketing
5. Think about user experience, accessibility, usability, and writing for the web to meet user needs

Okay, a fantastic website design can be nothing without well-targeted content. A content director is a person responsible for filling your website with content. This process might include getting and giving the logo to the designer so they can involve it in the layout. 

This director will put an action plan to cover every stage in the buyer’s journey throughout the marketing funnel. It also includes seeding a blog with a couple of initial articles using internal and external links and Youtube videos to enhance search engine optimation (SEO) performance.  

Core Skills:

1. Excavate and oversee the content plan
2. Have a creative vision and collaboration skills
3. Brilliant communication skills to understand and work with stakeholders
4. Deliver engaging content meeting KPIs and other performance metrics
5. Drive traffic and revenue through content

So, how do you build such a team to make it work and deliver the best results? 

In many ways! However, it depends on your budget and goal. Read on to explore the practical approach. 

How Can Profiletree Help You?

Looking at this article, you might panic if you’re a small business or need more time to structure a website strategy team from scratch.

No, please stop! There is an abundance of ways to reduce the scoop and size of your website strategy team.

One of these options is outsourcing. Typically, you would outsource the content and outsource the web development part of the package for project architecture. 

You can hire a vendor to build (and maintain and update) your website.

Again, you don’t necessarily need to hire a full-time person in every role to structure a website strategy team. Actually, for the average company that refreshes its website maybe once a year, though, a full website strategy team is generally overkill.  

Otherwise, outsourcing is a perfect solution to end up this nerve-wracking process as it leaves you only communicating with one person, a project manager, and a content director to put your content into your site.  

Not just that…

In Profiletree, we integrate all previous roles into your consultant for smooth management and even use an automated platform to keep you updated throughout designing your website.

After we listen to your business objectives, we will highlight gaps and fill them in with professional specialists— even if you don’t know which role you need the most.

How?

• Identify your website’s goals and purpose
• Plan the best operating model for you
• Create your identity and tone of voice to stand out
• Recognise potential challenges and make alternative plans to go through them

What if you need to keep your team’s needs down?

Then, we will guide you to use WordPress, Wix, or other content management systems offering training for your employees to install a basic framework that helps you set up your site. You don’t need to build any codes or hire a coder.

Instead, you can rely on our website builders and consultant familiar with the system you’re using to help your team with the initial setup.

Consider our experts as your reliable tech partner who is an unfailing source of innovative ideas backed with long years of experience. You will guarantee an agile process for win-win opportunities. Contact us now!