MarTech360 Interview with Dominique LeBlond, Chief Product Officer at Bynder

“Acknowledging that change will be a constant and therefore being able to mobilize rapidly towards what matters to your customers is probably a common element everyone will need to tackle to drive growth.”

Given your extensive experience as a technology leader in enterprise and internet based software, what key strategies do you implement to ensure that product and technology teams consistently deliver innovative,  business focused software offerings? How do you balance the  demands of managing and mentoring teams while also driving the product and technology strategy for Fortune 1000 companies, particularly in the areas of web content management and digital experience delivery.

 It’s important to create focus across teams through a common vision on what we want to achieve for our customers. This then creates the foundation on which individual teams can build near term objectives to achieve that are then shared across product and engineering through a set of OKRs. It’s important to have the teams help define these objectives as it is also how we scale our work and bring responsibilities at a team level. Ultimately, the way we manage and mentor our teams is through collaboration and coaching as opposed to distributing work. Our aim is to work toward clear outcomes which in turn creates a shared view on what everyone is working towards and helps us drive a better impact for our customers.

Dominique, can you tell us about your professional background and your current role at Bynder Also tell us how does Bynder differentiate itself from other companies in the same space?

Professionally, I have held product leadership functions across B2C, B2B, B2G domains always with a software or technology focus. In my CPO role at Bynder, I am responsible for setting the product strategy and guiding the product and design teams in expanding our amazing offering. Bynder differentiates itself through its unique digital asset management capabilities that, while able to support advanced and complex organization models and go-to-market use cases, are designed with ease of use and customers in mind. We take out all the complexity of managing and distributing thousands of assets to allow users to focus on what matters, their brand, campaign or content asset. We are also a strong innovator and spend a significant amount of time looking as to how emerging technologies could further help solve our customers challenges or drive opportunities across their martech stacks.

How does Bynder’s composable architecture enhance the delivery of exceptional content experiences across various channels and touchpoints, and what role does the developer’s toolkit play in achieving this?

To create exceptional content experiences at scale, you need to approach the martech architecture from an end-to-end standpoint and really connect multiple systems and teams to work together. It’s really important to enhance existing solutions that exist with more advanced content or digital experience capabilities rather than trying to do everything. Bynder does this by providing connectivity and extensibility for upstream systems (e.g creative & design tools, business workflows) as well as downstream systems (e.g. WCM, PIM, eCommerce). Our developer toolkit’s role in the equation is to reduce the cost of implementation by providing rich APIs and more than 100 pre-built integrations to existing systems our customers use.

Also Read: MarTech360 Interview with Rytis Lauris, Co-founder and CEO at Omnisend

How is Bynder leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance the  management, organization, and accessibility of digital assets within its platform, ultimately  streamlining workflows and empowering creative teams to be more efficient and effective?

Bynder was an early adopter to AI technologies in that we see how it can help to further automate and scale the work that comes in managing content at scale. From a capability standpoint, we provide AI capabilities to help classify or enrich asset metadata, identify specific elements of an asset (e.g. logos, people, ingredients) as well as creating unparalleled ways to find content by leveraging AI across search and discovery use cases. We do see a need to approach AI in a responsible manner and therefore also provide customers with clarity and control on why, where and how AI is applied in their processes that they can also control and further enhance.

As Bynder continues to innovate in the digital asset management space, how do you prioritize feature development to meet the evolving needs of your customers, and what role does customer feedback play in shaping your product roadmap?

We work closely with our customers to align our product strategy and roadmap and we do so by engaging at multiple levels; from real-time feedback on use and feedback they share, working with launching customers and early adopters to iterate on early stage product ideas to aligning strategic direction by getting insights from our Customer Advisory Board on the market trends and business opportunities that they see emerging.

What current trends in Digital Asset Management (DAM) are shaping the industry’s future, and how does Bynder plan to innovate in response to these trends and customer needs?

The exponential growth of assets to manage across the enterprise is driving the need for Strategic DAM deployments, which is what Bynder is all about. We see this in customer trends looking for broader automation and governance over the overall content lifecycle but also the ability to mobilize DAM capabilities across the digital ecosystem through integrations. AI is revolutionizing the way that content is created, managed and consumed. This will continue to drive changes in business process and analytics which is an area we are excited to continue to spearhead with our customers and see evolve as technology matures.

What advice do you have for other executives aiming to drive growth and innovation for their brand?

That’s a tough question as the context of execution is key to make choices around. That said, acknowledging that change will be a constant and therefore being able to mobilize rapidly towards what matters to your customers is probably a common element everyone will need to tackle to drive growth. Beyond this, partner with your customers, understand what is keeping them up at night and allow your teams to engage with them to figure out how this can be remedied.

Where do you see Bynder and its products in the next five years?

Bynder will be the undisputed leader in the DAM category. This is the ambition we have set forth and are working towards across the company. This will obviously require us to maintain and expand our best-in-class products so we can continue working with our industry leading customers and partners.

Is there anything that you’re currently reading, or any favorite books, that you’d recommend

I love reading about how others are solving the product to market challenges and see how this can help enhance what we already do. I’m about to start on Product Operations: How successful companies build better products at scale by Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles.

Thanks, Dominique!