The 5 Essential Roles for 2021 September 2020 Danny Denhard

We all know how challenging 2020 is and was. 2021 will be the year many business have to scrap, others will just survive but the smart and future seeing companies will thrive. Here are the 5 roles organisations will need to hire or restructure to be successful.

1. Culture Community Manager Why? A dedicated culture community manager understands the importance of culture, understands the importance of keeping a positive beat within the business. High trust role. Offers a way to bring business decisions closer to culture and communicate these and brings people closer to the numbers and explain people + performance. Connects leadership with what is happening within the organisation.

2. Retention Marketer Why? Understands broader Marketing channels, segmentation, the importance of keeping and engaging an audience. This is a specialist role and has to play well with Generalists and Specialists, alongside managing stakeholders well. Must understand Product and Product cycles, this could be Growth Marketer but rare to keep them in retention. Essential in turning old customers in repeat and re-engage vs re-acquire.

3. Project Manager Why? Projects are slipping, projects and campaigns rarely hit the target date outside huge businesses and project management is a skill that lost it’s popularity alongside having more agile processes, with all this in mind Project Management not Product Management is required inside many businesses. High quality project managers are priceless and have to keep businesses on track with important projects and releases for 2021 .

4. Growth Specialist Why? Growth will be essential more than ever, in 2021 Growth will be vital part of ensuring businesses stay open and can offer improved products for their customers. Growth is often bundled with Performance Marketing or Product. It is important to note that this role should be a Growth specialist who can blend these areas together, come up a dedicated roadmap of prioritised work and the impact it will have, alongside a focus on delivery. Test, learn, iterate can be taken on by many departments however having one dedicated person or small team will help the right businesses to go from scrapping to thriving in 2021.

5. Innovation Specialist Why? Many organisation have had to reduce down their teams and the reduce headcount will limit the number of innovation projects that the teams will be able to create and deliver. The Innovation specialist must have experience in delivering in small teams and cross functionally, alongside having the political clout to make sure these projects happen vs just tweaking exciting and underperforming products or campaigns.

Businesses are: “Too busy” “Have too many things to do” “Have too many meetings” Suffering from bad communication All leading to bad company culture Focus is on a mission to fix the broken world of work.

9 +Thank You From Focus DANNY DENHARD The world of work has lost its focus! Focus was created to cut through the noise, cut through confusion and ensure businesses focus on developing their organisations and performance. FOUNDER E: DANNY@FOCUS.BUSINESS W: WWW.FOCUS.BUSINESS/MANIFESTO M: ANONYMOUS HELPLINE: +447480064060