Company
🏦 Santander
Skill Area
Product & Development
Tool Stack
UmbracoJIRAHTML/CSSJS
Overview
⚙️ Technology | Websites built in Umbraco CMS with outsourced development, maintenance, and hosting. Development backlog was maintained in JIRA. CMS included various industry-specific features such as loan and affordability calculators, besides the standard content management. |
👥 Ownership structure | • Commercial team (with myself as lead) owned non-sensitive sections of the site (e.g. calculator, content pages) to enable rapid feature implementation
• IT department maintained ownership of application forms containing sensitive financial/personal data
• Agency developers reported directly to Commercial team rather than IT |
Scope & Responsibilities
- CMS Business Ownership with Growth Objective:
- Product owner for Umbraco CMS platform and primary business contact for development agency (Poort80)
- Managed all technical and data topics across SEO, PPC, CRO in context of website changes, as well as ensuring content and UI team requirements were fully met to create the high converting landing and content pages for digital marketing
- Made final decisions on CMS feature prioritization and implementation approaches in collaboration with the external developers’ PM
- Backlog Management:
- Maintained and prioritized development backlog in JIRA. including topics such as:
- Based on CRO experiment results and insights
- Business case justifications for on-site SEO improvements
- Requirements from B2B partners and integration needs
- Compliance requirements from Legal, Risk, and Cybersecurity departments
- Wrote functional requirements for new CMS features that advanced marketing goals, for example:
- Auto image compression for improved page speed and SEO
- Enhanced data layer fields to better categorize content for analytics
- Custom content modules for campaign-specific landing pages
- Technical Implementation:
- Executed data-related technical implementations:
- See also: data layer project
- Maintained oversight of agency-executed non-data implementations
- Agency Partnership:
- Established and managed relationship with development agency as primary business owner
- Established clear KPIs and performance expectations for agency deliverables while working closely with CDO, CIO and HQ teams to ensure cybersecurity requirements, SLAs and requirements were met
- Analytics & Compliance:
- Owned strategy for all online data collection
- Ensured alignment between marketing analytics needs and compliance requirements
- Connected relevant business units to ensure data was actionable
Challenges and Solutions
CMS & Form Architecture
- Designed split ownership structure between marketing content and application forms, in order to achieve the most flexibility possible while complying with rigid internal Santander Group cybersecurity rules
- Allowed for rapid testing and development with external agency partners (with whom it was impossible to work with for application form part, as the latter dealt with sensitive customer data that could only be managed by internal IT)
Conversion Rate Optimization Program:
- Established systematic A/B testing framework for loan calculator and application flow, which were part of Umbraco CMS
- Deployed iterative improvements based on data insights and user behavior
- See also:
Content Focus & Team Support
- Ideated and designed requirements for self-service content management capabilities for the marketing & content team
- Conceptualized and implemented reusable campaign landing page templates to reduce time-to-market in collaboration with UX/UI and content team
- Developed technical documentation and training materials for business users
Cross-Market Integration
- Unified tracking and implementation across Netherlands and Belgium websites
- Standardized development processes while maintaining market-specific requirements
- Created scalable solutions that could be deployed across the 2 markets
Results - Highlights
- Development Velocity:
- >30 deployments annually over a 3-year period (not counting CRO test developments, which were out of these deployments)
- Reduced release cycle time from 7 to 2 days
- Decreased time-to-resolution for post-deploy bugs to average of resolution within the hour
- Business Impact:
- Improved conversion rates through continuous CRO experimentation (see also) on loan calculator and application flow
- Enhanced lead quality through optimized user journeys and content targeting
- Maintained consistent lead generation while managing inflow according to business capacity
- Technical Achievements:
- Implemented comprehensive cross-channel tracking system
- Improved CMS Infrastructure for on-page SEO (see also)
- Unified data collection across Netherlands and Belgium markets
- Created marketing-focused CMS enhancements that:
- Improved site performance through automated image optimization
- Enhanced data collection via custom content categorization fields
- Empowered marketing team to create and deploy landing pages independently