If you put five people in a room and ask for opinions, you will get six different ones – there is always someone that disagrees with him/herself. Creative, technology, marketing, and other groups are offering their views and giving advice to digital about what they should do. At lunches and in break rooms – and during meetings – everyone comments on how digital should work or how campaign attribution should change, or the shortcomings of a website.

Most people give their opinion on digital marketing with a limited frame of reference. We always give suggestions to other departments without understanding all the components that have to be looked at in order to make judgements. But, if you put on the analyst hat and think beyond your functions, your opinions would be more appropriate.

I just finished working on the launch of a new program and website for the company I work at. I was part of a multifunctional team that was tasked with developing a customer rewards program, which would replace a legacy membership model that was crumbling. The main objective was to address customer needs to find new growth and reestablish the brand with customers.

My team's responsibility was to focus on the digital components of the program; user interface, online promotion, and web analytics. After several meetings, the team came up with a plan.

We met once a week with all stakeholders to go over all aspects of the project and the launch, making sure that we all learned about each other's tasks, and how they would affect the plans, so that every team member had a broad perspective on responsibilities. Everyone felt responsible for the launch. The team approached each aspect of the launch in a very analytical fashion, questioning each other and applying their skills across the board to align with the business needs.

We had a successful launch, and I've realized that this was only possible due to our broad definition of responsibilities approach to our work in this project. It forced everyone to analyze all the considerations; all the components.

And yes, it was frustrating at times, and it created a lot of stress within the team, but we got used to the experience and started viewing what should be done. The requirements kept changing along way; platforms had limitations, executives looking at the same thing at different times came up with different ways of how they wanted things done. But the team's constant analysis and input made it possible for everyone to arrive at a balanced judgement.

Do you encourage your team to think beyond their role?