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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#765: Hexagon AB's George Chang on building a unified system of marketing measurement
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George Chang
Yes to adventure.
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George Chang
the Agile Brand.
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Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know, stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and Martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, e commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together, we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show.
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When it comes to your digital experience, how often does a great idea from a senior leader's gut feeling get completely dismantled by actual user data? Agility requires willingness to be wrong and the systems to prove it quickly. It's about building a culture that values learning over being right and relentlessly iterates based on real human behavior, not internal assumptions. Today we're going to talk about moving beyond best practice and intuition to build a truly data driven digital experience. We'll explore how to create a disciplined conversion rate optimization program where usability testing, AB experimentation and personalization aren't just separate tactics, but a unified system, especially within a powerful platform like sitecore, to build experiences that adapt to customer needs, not just our assumptions about them. We're here in Orlando, Florida at Sitecore Symposium 2025 and to help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome George Chang, Senior Director, Digital Experience and Technology Corporate Marketing at Hexagon ab. George, welcome to the show.
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George Chang
Thanks Greg, Happy to be here.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, looking forward to Always great to do these in person here, live at these events. But before we dive in, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Hexagon?
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George Chang
Sure. So as you mentioned, I lead our Digital Experience team at Hexagon My team and I, we're responsible for all the various digital touch points of the Hexagon brand. This includes everything from user experience optimization to content strategy, to feature and web development. Over the past couple of years, our focus has really been on our brand website, hexagon.com, really, to help build a more coherent and modern website to better serve our customers.
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Greg Kilstrom
Great. So, and I know you touched briefly on it, but, you know, for the listeners who may not be that familiar with Hexagon, maybe give us an overview of the company, the types of customers you serve, and why a sophisticated digital experience is so critical to the business.
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George Chang
Yeah, absolutely. So Hexagon is the global leader in measurement technologies. And so, in short, our products really provide our customers with confidence in accuracy. So if you really think about it, a lot of the technology that we use really requires highly accurate measurements. So if you want to 3D scan something, right at its core, it's just a collection of a huge number of measurements made in really close proximity to one another. And the more precise your measurement, the closer proximity you get, the higher fidelity you get. And then if you look at something like autonomy for, like, autonomous vehicles, that's not much more than just a ton of 3D scans, all done in very rapid succession and using that data to navigate. So Hexagon's measurement technology spans a number of industries. We do things in manufacturing, we do things in surveying and construction, we do things in mining, even things like CGI for movies and tv. And I think is that telling of that story through the web medium that spans so many different industries? That really is the challenge that we're looking to solve.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Yeah. Great. So, yeah, we're going to talk about marketing measurement for a measurement company. This is great. So let's start though, with kind of the strategic foundation. And touching on what I talked about in the intro is just moving from I have a hunch or this feels right to actual insight and being data driven. So a lot of organizations treat conversion rate optimization as a tactical function. What do you do at Hexagon to elevate it more strategically? And what was the catalyst for moving from project based testing to a more continuous optimization roadmap?
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George Chang
Yeah, I think to make CRO something strategic, you have to treat it like something strategic. I guess what I mean by that is you have to be intentional in including testing as part of not only how you execute, but also how you iterate. And I think that's really the key. You know that 3D scan example I just gave earlier? Right. If you Take a few measurements here and there, you're not really going to get a whole lot of useful information. But it's the large number of measurements in context with one another that gives you that level of fidelity. And I think testing and optimization is a similar story, right. You have to test and you have to test often. And because you're doing all these tests and you're getting all this information in context with one another, that gets you a level of fidelity of your users and that will help kind of inform your broader strategic decisions and how you want to take your business and not just isolated insights apart from one another.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. And so when you're building that strategic roadmap, how do you, you know, any successful organization, there's a lot of, you know, really smart, really experienced people on the team that have great ideas, right. But how do you balance those type of stakeholder requests with insights from raw usability testing, user behavior data? What's your process for prioritizing what to test first?
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George Chang
Yeah, that's a great question, because I think the nice thing about data is that it's objective. And then people in general, by definition, they're subjective, right? And so you definitely have the example of, you know, one person may really like something, but you run it through a test and you find that all the users hate it. Right. And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how much that person likes that thing, Right. The data tells you something differently and you really can't argue with it. There's that acronym, hippo, right. The highest paid person's opinion, Right. When you're talking about decisions being made. And the idea is that the decisions are often made by the person who has the highest job title in a, in a room. Right. And our stance on this whole thing is very much, you know, everyone's opinion is valid, right. Regardless of your job title or your pay, it's all valid. And we all want to look at kind of what options there are, but we want to run them through a test, right? And that's really our proof point. And so, you know, whoever you know, will take kind of any, any insights and any opinions that people have, we'll run them through a test. And if it's anything kind of, I've learned through this whole testing experience, it's that people are just so different from one another, right. And they do the unexpected, you know, and sometimes you forget that you yourself are often, often have a number of biases, right. Just from either the bubble that you work in or the environment that you were raised in, or even from a cultural perspective that you think one way is the only way, but in reality, people tend to surprise you. Right. And, and that's the one thing is like, no matter how obvious you feel like something is, run it through a test. And sometimes those tests will really surprise you because you just don't know kind of how people engage with a particular thing or a particular usability.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. So can you. Well, actually just one quick thing. So, you know, this morning at sitecore Symposium, it was announced, you know, sitecore XM and all the existing products are kind of rolling up into sitecore AI, I'm going to probably call it one or the other, you know, just, just as, as we move on. That's more a note for the, for the listeners than, than anything. But let's talk a little bit more about this, this testing process and maybe, maybe you could walk us through an example of how a, you know, specific insight from a usability test. Let's say, you know, some kind of friction point directly informed an a B test and ultimately something that you did to, to personalize it.
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George Chang
Yeah. As I mentioned earlier, kind of one of the big challenges is how do you tell that Hexagon story across so many different industries? Right. And so we started with our homepage, right. Which is the most traffic page on our website. And sometimes that's the first and often only opportunity, depending on, you know, how much they engage with our website, of telling this Hexagon story to someone who is new to Hexagon. So when we first kind of relaunched our site and with our new messaging, so we described Hexagon through our core capabilities, which we described succinctly as capture, create, immerse and activate. And so these were the capabilities that our products were accomplishing regardless of the industry that a user would be. And so while it was true and it was applicable, it just didn't really get a whole lot of engagement with users who were coming to this site. Right. And I think the hypothesis that we came up with was might have been a little bit too deep, might have been a little bit too vague. It wasn't really speaking to kind of user needs enough. And so we tweaked that messaging, we started talking about it in how we do our technology offerings. Right. And so talk about metrology, reality capture, positioning and some of our other advanced capabilities using a little bit more technology oriented terms that may not be as applicable to every industry. Right. But that are a little bit more specific to the technologies and the products that we offer. And so we ran this through an A B test in XM Cloud right through our current website and we really found that that messaging, you know, even though it's a little bit more specific to the technology, it wound up having better engagement and improved the dwell time on that section and improved the click through rate on that section. People are a little bit more engaged with what Hexagon does and start wanting to understand a little bit more of that story just based on the tweaking of that messaging. And you know, while it wasn't something that we necessarily originally thought was going to be the case, you know, again, sometimes through a test you find out a lot more about your users that way.
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Greg Kilstrom
And so, you know, as you scale, you know, there's some companies that are, you know, famous for running, you know, just thousands of concurrent, you know, Amazon and booking.com and you know, others are just, you know, they're, they're running thousands of concurrent tests and they've really operationalized that. How do you manage the operational side of this? You know, how does a platform like sitecore help you move from the steps you described, you know, identifying an opportunity to deploying and then, you know, ultimately personalizing an experience.
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George Chang
So I think the scaling of the program doesn't mean necessarily that you have to scale like a centralized team to be able to execute that testing. And so as we scale this program internally, we're looking to scale, we're looking to democratize that testing and personalization process as widely as we can. We want to distribute that scale of people by enabling all these marketers to be able to do this themselves, to be a little bit more self sufficient, that they should be able to propose a hypothesis and then create a test and then take action on the outcome of that test and then iterate. Right? Like they should be able to be enabled and empowered to do all these things by themselves. So they're not waiting for someone to do it for them. And it helps that way because a lot of these marketers are closer to the ground, to the local customers that they're working with. They may have some more understanding of local color or more industry color for some of the messaging that they have. And so being able to kind of scale this and to enable marketing teams to be able to do this more distributed has been really helpful. And we're able to do this because of sitecore XM Cloud, right? That platform has the testing and personalization interfaces built directly into the same interface that they go in and do their content editing and the content authoring and page creation. Process. And so because it's already a familiar interface to them, this makes it really easy to enable them to be able to do these things and to be able to do this optim. To participate as part of this optimization process, to kind of take the next step after that. Content creation process.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And a key part of that, of course, is the measurement part. Not the type of measurement Hexagon does for its customers, but the marketing measurement part of that. And let's talk a little bit about that piece as well, because I agree having all those things connected makes it a lot easier. And the switching and even the cognitive load of switching applications and stuff can be. It's a benefit to not have to do that. So conversion rate certainly is an obvious metric to measure, but doesn't always tell the whole story. What other KPIs or even qualitative measures do you look at to understand how experiments are performing and improving the journey? Deepening engagement, all of that?
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George Chang
Yeah. We look at a number of metrics that kind of span a number of different ways that you're looking at this data. We kind of refer to it as engagement quality. Right. Basically, we're looking at the metrics that ask what signals confidence to a user for Hexagon. Right. What content makes sense to a user, what do they engage in? This sometimes will show up as dwell time on a key section that we mentioned before. Right. How long are people kind of sitting down and reading that section, what the scroll depth on a particular page is? Are they engaged with the content that they want to read more and they want to keep going down? Obviously, we're looking at user journeys, how engaged users are and clicking through to the next step of that journey. But basically, whatever we're looking at in the context of that page and what a user is trying to do, that we feel moves users closer to the intent of what they want to do?
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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George Chang
And while conversions are nice, as we all kind of experience, conversions never really follow a straight golden journey. They go all over the place. And so we're just looking at each kind of step of this place on each page that they're engaging in, where is that engagement happening? Where do they have the confidence in understanding what they're looking for and understanding what they're reading? And you know, by that we just kind of expect the conversion to follow as a side effect of all this. Right. As long as the user has confidence in what they're reading and understanding and moving on somewhere in the site, that's great. And then we just kind of let the conversions follow.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And a lot of what you're describing sounds like, I mean, I'm sure getting it set up initially took, you know, it was a behavior change and you know, change is never easy, but it sounds like there's an organizational culture that, you know, maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, but you know, that embraces experimentation and, and embraces the idea that the, the best ideas win and you know, data driven and all those kinds of things, you know, for, for marketing leaders, you know, whether they're here at sitecore Symposium or listening to the show, what's a piece of advice that you'd give them for building the type of culture and agile insight driven organization that can do the kinds of things you're talking about?
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George Chang
Yeah, it's really just getting everyone on board, Right. And I think part of it is understanding that a failed test gives you just as much insight as a successful test. Right? The success in driving this culture of testing isn't dictated by how many tests you get, right? Like how many times your hypothesis was proven. Right. But really how many good quality tests that you're actually able to run. Because with every test you learn something, whether it's a success or a failure, it gives you some additional insight into what your users are doing or what your users are wanting. And so the more often you do it, the quicker you can react to those changes in the market or in user behavior. And as we all know, user behavior and the market changes all the time, right? And so the more often you test, the more often you get that feedback cycle. And it's something that you can act upon more readily, right. Whether it's a test that passes or a test that fails. It's also something that is not too hard to get started if you are an XM Cloud customer or a sitecore AI customer, it's something that you can literally start tomorrow. The test doesn't have to be fancy, it doesn't have to have some kind of deep hypothesis behind it that's going to change the world. Even just as simple as changing a little bit of the wording on the top CTA of your page. And you run a test. XM Cloud lets you do this in minutes with just a few clicks. Congratulations, you've begun. And I think the biggest thing is just to get started to run that first test and then to run the second test and then to run the third test and then eventually you'll start to learn more and more about your users. Every little bit kind of helps that understanding and then you get a better understanding. Again, it's getting that fidelity of the users through your testing processes.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I love both, all of it. But, you know, the two key points for me at least are, you know, first getting started, because to your point, there's, there's always reasons not to do any manner of things, but also just, and I think leaders need to hear this again and again, is that it's okay if your idea isn't successful or whatever, because to exactly what you said, you're learning and sometimes you need to learn a lot of different things of what not to do to, to, to make them successful. But yeah, as we kind of wrap up, just a couple, a couple last questions for you here. You know, we're here at sitecore Symposium in Orlando. What's been a highlight of, of the conference so far for you this year?
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George Chang
Yeah, yeah, this year has been amazing and I'm so happy to be here. The new announcements and kind of the buzz are always the headlines of every symposium, and definitely this year had quite a bit of good announcements. So I'm really looking forward to get my hands on some of this and to play with it, really get into it. But beyond that, I think the community that gathers at symposium is really always the best. It's a great time to get together with everyone. I've been as part of the sitecore community and working in the sitecore space for well over a decade. I've been an MVP for nine years. And so I really just love the community and all the people here. And for some of us it's, you know, because the community is so wide and widespread, for some of us is the only time we get to see each other in person, which is really great. It's good to catch up with people. But, you know, the sitecore technology is great and the platform is wonderful, but it's really this passion of the people behind it. Right. It's not just partners and customers, but also sitecore themselves, kind of enabling this community and that's really what makes this ecosystem really special.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Yeah. Love it. Well, George, thanks so much for joining today. One last question before we wrap up. What do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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George Chang
Yeah, I wish there was an easy button to just do this, but I think you really just have to spend the time to keep up with technology and the marketing trends. Right. Like we talked about earlier, things move so quickly right now, especially with AI and data and all these things, and you just have to do your best to stay ahead of the curve. And you know, I mentioned the sitecore community earlier and the sitecore community has, is. Is fantastic in sharing knowledge and sharing information and helping each other. And so if you get the opportunity, you know, get immersed in that community, just hearing kind of what people are talking about will start sparking ideas, will kind of keep you a little bit in the loop of what all is going on and really just use whatever tools you have to your advantage to learn what's going on. I mean, I think because things are moving so fast, we're all on equal footing as far as being experts in the new thing, right? And so we're all kind of learning together. You know, there's fantastic AI tools to help you understand some of this stuff. There's a lot of stuff that I definitely don't understand the first or second or fifth time reading through things that, you know, I'll pop you into chatgpt to be like, explain this. Like I'm five, right? Like just to understand some of the concepts. So yeah, I mean, I think you just have to spend some time to understand kind of what all is happening in the industry, what all is happening in the space and really embrace it. You know, be brave, take on new things and just embrace failure. Right. And kind of fail fast and move on. And that's, I feel like that's the real, only real way to stay agile.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Love it. Well, again I'd like to thank George Chang, Senior Director, Digital Experience and Technology Corporate Marketing at Hexagon for joining the show. You can learn more about George and Hexagon and sitecore by following the links in the show notes.
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Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagile brand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me if you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkillstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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George Chang
The agile brand.
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Audi Q3 Commercial Voice
To realize the future America needs, we understand what's needed from us to face each threat head on. We've earned our place in the fight for our nation's future. We are Marines. We were made for this.