5 key components of a digital team

Your team is like an organism, if some of its parts don’t work properly, it endangers the host. In the same way, if your digital team doesn’t work, it endangers your department or your entire organization.

As an antidote to this danger we have gathered five key components of a digital team. These might help you build strong processes, skills, and confidence within your team.

1. Digital strategy

A living organism doesn’t just roam around without any meaning, and in the same way your digital team needs planning and purpose. This is where a digital strategy comes into the picture.

A strategy is a long-term plan with a more or less detailed account of goals, actions, requirements, and roles. According to Business Queensland, what you need in a digital strategy is, among other things, an online presence, digital marketing, online sales, CRM, online security, supplier interaction, and responsive solutions.

With these strategic components in place, your team is empowered to align your actions with the KPIs from the management, and enact on your plans to fulfill this vision.

You might for instance have a goal of increasing visitor engagement with your services, and with a solid digital strategy you can deliver an online presence to your visitors, market towards them to get more engagement, and measure the engagement in your CRM—all while keeping the security intact.

Read more: How to lead a successful digital team »

2. Method

While a digital strategy is a vital part of your digital team’s direction and purpose, the methods to achieve your professed results can vary immensely. There is an abundance of different frameworks for work methods and collaboration processes out there, but we recommend especially Google’s design sprint.

This process allows you to quickly go from an idea on how to solve a specific problem to a high-fidelity prototype in just a week. Other alternatives include the agile methodology and the lean method.

These kinds of smooth methods require smooth accompanying tools—tools that allow you to keep documentation, track progress, enable collaboration, and boost progress. You can find a lot of options also here, but we recommend Slack, Trello, and Google Docs for fast and user-friendly delivery.

3. Environment of sharing

Classical team building activities like bowling or dining are certainly instrumental in maintaining a great work environment, but another aspect that can greatly improve the general sentiment is a culture of knowledge sharing.

Go ahead and cultivate the kind of company culture where coworkers not only love their job, but also love to speak about findings, learnings, and sharing their knowledge. Encourage your teammates to attend conferences, workshops, and seminars you have picked up, or recommend reading books, blogs, and magazines with interesting and useful content.

Such an environment can help foster innovation and benevolence. To kickstart the genesis of such a culture, start with yourself: Discover interesting knowledge and share it with colleagues you think will benefit from it.

4. Technical platform

Having a strategy, method, and environment in place is great, but your digital team also need a solid technical platform to enhance your digital dreams.

The engine behind your digital experiences is of course the content platform, or content management system (CMS).

A content platform may decide form and functionality of your entire digital experience, from the looks of your website to the general user experience in different channels, like mobile, chatbots, and digital signage systems.

Use the best tools: Supercharge your site with Next.js and headless CMS »

As an extension to this you can find marketing enabling tools like analytics, web optimizers, and so on. It’s almost self-evident that this is something you and your team, and your organization’s stakeholders, must choose carefully.

5. Roles and skills

We have talked a lot about key components of your digital team like strategy, tactics, and tools, but what about the most important aspect—the people themselves?

Depending on the size and structure of your organization, you need a wide variety of skills in your digital team, from system architecture and development to marketing and copywriting. Remember, you are supposed to deliver a holistic digital experience to your customers, clients, and visitors, so no half-baked solution will do.

Some important skills you might need include: project management, solution architecture, UX design, web development, back-end development, content production, web editing, SEO, and testing.

Managing a digital team is no bed of roses. You have to be in a state of constant vigilance—always looking for new tech and HR trends, as well as signs of disruption, but also signs of quality you should emphasize and pull forward into the light. It can be helpful to make a timeline to organize your strategy and monitor progress.

This list of key components will hopefully make your job a little easier—now stay focused!

First published 3 December 2018, updated 12 August 2022.