So thank you all for, joining today. Good morning. Good afternoon depending on where you are sitting on the wall.Again, I really appreciate you joining me today at Women in Tech Global Conference twenty twenty five. My name is Maria Mora Ramiro. Two surnames. I'm originally Spanish, living in UK for the last eight years. And I would like to invite you into a journey with me to discover tech strategy and digital marketing one step at a time. We this session is twenty minutes long, so most likely, we won't have, time for questions. But I will be pleased if you join me in LinkedIn. So I started my journey twenty years ago. I deliver projects and developed products.

Along my career, I've worked as a BA, PM, product manager, scrum master, portfolio manager, and recently as a I work as an adviser. I've had immense pleasure to collaborate with not only big international corporations, but working closely with the startups, charities, and smaller companies. Along my career, my purpose has always been helping organizations to navigate the unknowns of launching and scaling solutions. That's why I founded 1stepchallenge.com because it's all about walking the walk. It's all about one step at a time. And I see Yosna. Yes. I'm sharing the slides, and I got confirmation from Rashi that he could he could see it. Okay. Okay. So I will continue. I hope, Yotsna the the slides are only a guide, so I will be talking and taking me with with this journey.

But first of all, I would like to ask you to close your eyes. Close your eyes, take this pause, and imagine a magic box. The size, the color, will it be used to move houses? Will it be used to, storage as a storage in an office? Yes. Imagine that magic box. And now open your eyes. The question I have for you is, what would what if you would like to build, promote, and sell that magic box? Based on my own experience, it doesn't matter the size of the organization, how many team members are involved, or how much budget is available. In order to launch and scale solutions, there are always three pillars to build upon, prototype, product, and operations. So putting this in mind, let's start our journey to discover how to build that magic box that you just imagined. Let's explore the first pillar, prototype.

Because as Arnold Glasso said, an idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied. So that quote take us to the research. You need to know your competitors. Who else is selling that box? Is it magic? What kind of magic the box has? Understanding your the landscape and environment you will get in into will help you to define what you should do next. You can use templates and frameworks as SWOT and VESL to consolidate all the environment, all the information about this environment, and be able to check it afterwards. You will need to assess what you will need. Will you need a website? Will you need a, an app? Will you need online payments? Including that research, exploring different alternatives that will help you to evaluate which one is the best for you.

But the key question here is, who would like to be to buy that magic box? And will those customers download the download it in their computers and they will beat it, themselves, or will the magic box be delivered to their doorstep? That's why visualizing the customer journey is key to help you answer those questions. I always recommend to use the RACE framework that stands for reach, act, convert, and engage. Working on those four stages will not only help you and guide you to build your digital marketing marketing strategy, but it will support you on the research to understand what else is required. From there, the magic box should become a minimum viable product or MVP. Why do you need an MVP? Well, because you need to validate those assumptions, the hypothesis, and the research that you did previously.

Maybe it's as simple as generating an AI product image for an awareness campaign in Instagram, in case that Instagram is in the digital channel that your target audience will use. But, definitely, you need to start as soon as possible validating the the the hypothesis and in order to understand if there is an appetite in the market for your idea, for your magic box. Once you have validated that first idea, start building your backlog. What additional features and functionalities you would like to include and incorporate in that magic box, but prioritize. You don't need to do everything at the same time. Priorities should be guided by your goals. If in this case, what you want to get is feedback from your MVP, then make it simple and launch it into the market. That's what you are looking forward to. And then in terms of organizing the tasks, I'm a fan of Kanban.

You can go into and use specific templates, but you can just build it yourself with five different columns. You can have the to do, ready, in progress, done, unblocked. So from there, let's imagine that the magic box awareness campaign that you launched in Instagram was a complete success. And now you have hundreds of potential customers that sign up for email marketing. What is coming next? Building up on your backlog and following up with your road map. I'm all into visualizing the key milestones as if they were stops in your journey, same as if you would plan your trip in Google Maps. The road map could be as a feesborne, will narrow the marketing and tech milestones. You will see in one single page what needs to be done, when needs to be done, and see the dependencies. And this is where things get interesting.

Based on the information collected and the feedback received from the MVP and the awareness campaign, continue scaling your product. Create new features and ask you ask yourself, the way I'm building the magic box, is it really scalable? Next up, getting to know your customer. That's your target audience, and that will be the baseline for the marketing strategy. Releasing new functionalities in that amazing magic box, for example, offering different sizes, it doesn't matter if nobody knows about it. That's why the marketing and tech strategy should be a joint effort. Last but not least, and surprise, you cannot do everything by yourself. So evaluate what can be externalized and integrate with third parties. As an example, during your research, you found out that you had to include, payments online.

Well, you don't need to build the on the payment gateway by yourself. You can just use that research to land all the alternatives and make a decision based on the technology they offer, the innovation, the price, and the support that you will receive. Once you have chosen your, third party for this payment gateway, just integrate with it. Up until now, everything has been about imagining, building, promoting, delivering, engaging. However, if I ask you, is the magic box product really performing as expected? Would you be able to answer that question? Well, you would if you measure, measure, and measure. Since the very beginning, you need to understand your metrics and how they are aligned with your business goals. You need to measure how many features you deliver per release, how long does it take you to resolve bugs, what is the engagement rate, Are there any complaints raised to customer service?

Did anybody return the magic box? And did they post any not so nice comments in social media? Well, understanding those metrics, the thresholds that will guide you to set up alerts, like, when you need to really check what's going on, and the targets will guide you into making decisions. Another layer on the KPIs is that you will need to identify which kind of tools will track those KPIs and visualize them. It could be as simple as an simple as an Excel or as complicated as an as an automated integration between GA four, Instagram manager, and then integrate it with your CRM. Take it one step at a time. Start simple and keep building. And always remember, the customer is not your only stakeholder. You have the product team, the marketing team, the sales team, the customer service, and operations.

To take that a step further, the ultimate goal of creating a product is to get loyal customers. So the journey doesn't end when the customer buys the magic box once. You want that customer to keep buying more and more magic boxes and enjoying the features that you will be releasing to the ultimate state that he will feel so comfortable that he and or she will make referrals and will tell their friends, family, and the social media followers.

That's why in the RACE framework, you have the stage convert. Convert and engage. And your customer service would be essential for that engagement phase. You can use chat box to simplify some of the questions, but you need to decide as well when the customer will talk to a real person and if it will be done via email, phone number, and how you will answer the social media comments. And all while being compliant with any new regulations, ethics and compliance at the core of all the activities, including how digital marketing strategy leverage the data collected. Along this conference, we had had amazing speakers talking about the importance of cybersecurity and compliance with AI. So that's a perfect example what is important to be ahead of the game and always deliver reliable operations. To wrap up with this pillar with operations, whoever knows me, I always have a plan b and a plan c, and it's what I call creative.

Manage your risk metrics. Brainstorm with your team. List all the potential things that could go wrong. Tag them with the likelihood and the impact, and then prepare that mitigation or contingency. Again, Miro has wonderful templates, but you can just create it in a notebook as long as you revisited that as often as possible. And as an example, today, in case that the slides didn't work, I had my magic box with me. So this was my plan c. However, now the question that you might have is, okay. I know that you have that we have three pillars, prototype, product, and operations. How do these three pillars come together?

Based on my experience, in any scenario, whether the magic box is part of a line of business in a big company, if it's a start up, or a small business around the corner, there are always these stages. Early stage, where the magic box prototype is out in the market, compliant with regulations and metrics ready to track performance. The growth stage, remember to ask, is it scalable? New features require reliable operations and optimal customer service. At the latest stage, it's all about operations, keeping on with regular marketing campaigns, and enhancing the day to day processes. As Imran said, you cannot make progress without making decisions. So along this journey, there will be a point that I suggest you include in your road map where a decision needs to be made. Exit or expand? That's why those KPIs will become quite handy. The metrics will help you to evaluate the performance over time. So the magic boss be solved in other countries?

Or I don't know. Is there now a demand for round magic boxes? If that is the case, let's expand and let's go back to prototype. However, it could be the other way around. A data driven decision might indicate that customers are not interested in the magic box anymore. Maybe they found how to create their own magic. So all in all, this is my take on the journey to launch and scale digital solutions, one step at a time. Always remember, you have three pillars, prototype, product, and operations, and one challenge. Thank you all for joining me today. Again, it's been my pleasure to have you here. I will see you in the virtual world. You can find me at on LinkedIn, maria dot morra ramayra at one my website, 1stepchallenge.com.

And recently, I joined a dblist.org as a mentor, so I'm would be happy to find you there as well. Thank you so much for spending these twenty minutes with me. Have a lovely rest of your the conference, and and have fun. Thank you so much. And if any questions, please reach out to me on LinkedIn, and I will be pleased to continue the conversation. Thank you.