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 the 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.
Recorded live at Sitecore Symposium in Orlando, Florida, 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, A/B experimentation, and personalization aren’t just separate tactics, but a unified system, especially within a powerful platform like SitecoreAI, to build experiences that adapt to customer needs, not just our assumptions about them.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, George Chang, Senior Director, Digital Experience & Technology Corporate Marketing at Hexagon AB.
About George Chang
George Chang is the Senior Director of Digital Experience at Hexagon, leading digital transformation efforts to modernize web experiences, streamline operations, and drive business impact. With 25+ years of experience in development, marketing technology, content strategy, and digital platforms, he brings a unique ability to turn technical insights into strategic impact. A 9-time Sitecore MVP, George is an active voice in the DX community, advocating for scalable, user-centric experiences.
George Chang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgechang/
Resources
Hexagon AB: https://www.hexagon.com
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:00)
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, AV 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. Yeah, looking forward to, always great to do these in person here, know, live at these events. But before we dive in, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Hexagon.
George Chang (01:00)
Thanks, Greg. Happy to be here.
Sure. ⁓ So as you mentioned, I lead our digital experience team at Hexagon. ⁓ My team and I were 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.
Greg Kihlstrom (01:36)
Great. So, and I know you touched briefly on it, but for 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.
George Chang (01:51)
Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ So Hexcon 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, 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 it’s 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.
Greg Kihlstrom (02:49)
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 the of the strategic foundation and touching on what I talked about in the intro is just moving from, know, I have a hunch or this feels right to actual insights 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?
George Chang (03:27)
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 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.
Greg Kihlstrom (04:16)
Yeah. And so when you’re building that strategic roadmap, how do you, know, and any successful organization, there’s a lot of, you know, really smart, really experienced people on the team that have great ideas, right? You know, but how do you balance those type of stakeholder requests with insights from, you know, raw usability testing, user behavior data? What’s your, what’s your process for prioritizing what to test first?
George Chang (04:42)
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. And so you definitely have the example of where one person may really like something, but you run it through a test and you find that all the users hate it. at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how much that person likes that thing. The data tells you something differently and you really can’t argue with it. There’s that acronym hippo, the highest paid person’s opinion, 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 room. And our stance on this whole thing is very much, everyone’s opinion is valid, regardless of your job title or your pay. It’s all valid and we all want to look at what options there are, but we want to run them through a test. And that’s really our proof point. And so
you know, whoever, you know, we’ll take kind of 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 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.
Greg Kihlstrom (06:24)
So can you, ⁓ well actually just one quick thing. So this morning at Sitecore Symposium, was announced Sitecore XM and all the existing products are kind of rolling up into Sitecore AI. I’m gonna probably call it one or the other just as we move on. That’s more a note for the listeners than anything. But let’s talk a little bit more about this testing process and maybe you could walk us through an example of how a specific insight from a usability test, let’s say some kind of friction point directly informed an A-B test and ultimately something that you did to personalize it.
George Chang (06:59)
As I mentioned earlier, kind 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 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 with our new messaging,
So we describe Hexagon through our core capabilities, which we describe 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. And I think the hypothesis that we came up with was it might have been a little bit too deep, might have been a little bit too vague.
speaking to user needs enough. And so we tweaked that messaging. We started talking about it in how we do our technology offerings. 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, 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 ExumCloud, 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 Hexgon 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. know, again, sometimes through a test you find out a lot more about your users that way.
Greg Kihlstrom (08:51)
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 running thousands of concurrent tests and they’ve really operationalized that. How do you manage the operational side of this? You 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 personalize an experience.
George Chang (09:21)
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, right, 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. 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 Sycore 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. 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 participate as part of this optimization process to kind of take the next step after that content creation process.
Greg Kihlstrom (10:49)
Yeah, and a key part of that, of course, is the measurement part, you know, 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, you know, it’s a benefit to not have to do that. you know, conversion rate, you know, 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 if, you know, how experiments are performing and improving the journey, know, deepening engagement, all of that.
George Chang (11:31)
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, you know, 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, you know, dwell time on a key section that we mentioned before, right? How long are people kind of sitting down and reading that section?
How, with 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 in 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. And while conversions are nice, as we all have
kind of experience, right, conversions never really follow a straight golden journey. They go all over the place. And so we’re just looking at, you know, at each kind of step of this place, right, 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.
Greg Kihlstrom (12:57)
Yeah. And a lot of what you’re describing sounds like, mean, I’m sure getting it set up initially took, you know, it was a behavior change and, 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 best ideas when and, and, you know, data driven and all those kinds of things, you know, for
For marketing leaders, you know, whether they’re here at Sidecourse Symposium or listening to this show, what’s a piece of advice that you’d give them for building the type of culture and, you know, agile, insight-driven organization that can do the kinds of things you’re talking about?
George Chang (13:39)
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. as we all know, user behavior in 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 XMcloud 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 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. XMcloud lets you do this in minutes with just a few clicks. Congratulations. You’ve begun. And I think the biggest step
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, right? 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.
Greg Kihlstrom (15:16)
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 OK if your idea doesn’t 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 make them successful. yeah, as we kind of wrap up, just a couple of couple last questions for you here. We’re here at Sitecore Symposium in Orlando. What’s been a highlight of the conference so far for you this year?
George Chang (15:55)
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. 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 psych core community and working with the psych core 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, is really great. It’s good to catch up with people, but you know, the psych core 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.
Greg Kihlstrom (16:56)
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?
George Chang (17:06)
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 psych core community earlier and the psych core community is fantastic in sharing knowledge and sharing information and helping each other. so.
If you get the opportunity, get immersed in that community, just hearing what people are talking about will start sparking ideas, will 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. Because things are moving so fast, we’re all on equal footing as far as being experts in the new thing. And so we’re all learning together.
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 into chat GPT 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 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, And kind of fail fast and move on. And that’s, feel like that’s the real, only real way to stay agile.
