Help me create a job title

Hi Guys,

Don't really want to mention the company I work for, but it has presence in almost 200 countries with sales of almost 70 billion dollars.

So, my boss asked me to conger up some new work titles for the team and I wanted to crowd source it a bit.

Here's the gist of what we do ...

1- We work with digital agencies to provide best practices and guidelines on how we offer web hosting to our internal brand teams.

2- We procure either dedicated or shared hosting on behalf of the agencies so that they can upload their brand or campaign pages.

3- We help debug their code when somehow it doesn't work in our environment (Linux, Windows, NewRelic, SQL, etc)

4- We provide an innovation channel and center of excellence for site acceleration services (Akamai) and cloud technologies (AWS-centric like EC2, RDS, S3, CloudSearch, DynamoDB, etc)

5- We submit apps to the Android Play and Apple app stores for the brands, on behalf of the agencies.

6- Provide digital solution architecting for complex sites (like multi-region Node.js)

Some things I tossed around:

Digital Innovation Specialist
Digital Campaign Consultant
Campaign Hosting Specialist
Digital Campaign and Innovation Specialist
Digital Marketing Specialist

I would love to exchange dialog regarding your suggestions.

Thanks.

That list reads more like a list of competencies or capabilities of an entire company, e.g. a description page of an IT consulting firm. Would every person on the team be capable of doing all of that? If not, can you provide a better grouping/breakdown of the responsibilities and typical tasks of each position you are trying to create a job title for?

Also...

Cobalt2112 said:

1- We work with digital agencies to provide best practices and guidelines on how we offer web hosting to our internal brand teams.

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I don't quite understand the wording. Are you only saying that you share details about how your team does its own webhosting with your (potential?) external customers? Or am I missing the point?

Edit: Would you describe your company as a digital marketing firm that uses technology, or a technology-centric company that also provides digital marketing services? (The difference being whether you are more of a consumer or more of a producer of technology.) This would help (at least me) to better understand the scope of your company's work and help with framing an appropriate title.

In other words, they solely exist to mark up prices and act all friendly with you. They get you stuck with them so they can overcharge you repetitively. Am I understanding all of this correctly? Your phrasing speaks only marketing. You need to describe point for point what you do that actually adds value.

I agree, none of that is part of a job description. How can we suggest a job title if we don't know the persons roll in the company?

What your COMPANY does means absolutely nothing...what the PERSON does in that company is what creates a job title...

No one is actually impressed by fancy job titles. If I heard any of your suggestions I'd just say, "Great, and what does that mean?"

The only one that sounds reasonable is Digital Marketing Specialist, that's to the point and obvious.

That wordy nonsense may impress business folk but it doesn't really impress techies. It could just be summed up as; optimisation, strategy and mobile & web development. Or just development, three simple words to put on your business cards.

I'd go for digital campaign specialist.

Given the broad scope and relative vagueness of the functionalities you listed, the only title that I could suggest is something equally broad and vague, such as 'Digital Technologies Specialist', or at best maybe 'Systems Delivery and Support Engineer' could be somewhat informative.

Of course, such vague titles don't really give anybody any sort of idea what you do, which I would argue is the fundamental purpose of a job title. A job title which cannot do that is effectively useless. If your job titles aren't informative, there's no point making them long and complicated, either unless you want to be needlessly fancy sounding. If you're just trying to sound as fancy as possible, you might as well give yourselves titles like 'Grand O.G. Solutions Exploration Wizard' or 'High Chancellor of Hosting Architecture and Solutions Publishing'.

That was like wargames when the chick was like what does all this mean? and the guy was like I DONT KNOW BUT ITS GREAT

Hi guys,

Thanks for replying--and sorry for being vague. Our main business is as a CPG (Consumer Package Goods) company, we're not a software, hardware or ISP/hosting provider and we don't develop consumer-facing sites in-house. For that, each team in the respective geography has an agency roster (Ogilvy, Razorfish, BBH, JWT, etc) that they work with and with the brand teams to develop the upcoming campaign tactics (like Superbowl).

I listed typical tasks or responsibilities we perform in order to best give you guys a sense for what we do. I could say "Business Analyst" but that spans all industry verticals.

We are the 'men in the middle' who also make sure that the agencies are not simply fooling the non-technical teams and are not selling them overly complex solutions or we're not being used to beta-test some fancy or obscure framework.

I would also like to incorporate "Center of Excellence" some where, maybe just as the acronymn (COE)

Thanks again.

Cobalt2112 said:

I would also like to incorporate "Center of Excellence" some where, maybe just as the acronymn (COE)

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Putting that in the job title isn't really the right way to go about that, if you ask me. Your job title should articulate what you do, not who you work for or where you work. Outsiders to the company aren't going to know what your company's "Center for Excellence" is, so they're not going to know what a 'Center for Excellence Specialist' is.

I'd say that the best way to communicate that in email signatures and on business cards is to simply put 'Center of Excellence' under the title. If for instance, you work for 'Sandwich Co.' as a Software Developer (just hypothetical), you could put:
Bob Person
Software Developer
Center of Excellence
Sandwich Co.

Hi Dogs,

No, COE denotes where the main expertise is for a function or business practice. For example, at both my former employer (20 years @ another CPG) we had a similar concept. There was the SAP Center of Excellence, BI COE, etc. Whenever you had an issue, the folks there are the most 'experts' in that field... and I put that in quotes because we all know that there are some talented people and there are some tree-trunks mixed in there too that talk the talk, but don't walk the walk.

So I would say...

Bob Person
Web Hosting Center of Excellence
Sandwich Co.

I've seen it on TV and heard it on the Radio, "We are a cancer treatment center of excellence"

Again, thanks for the great input!

Dogs said:

Putting that in the job title isn't really the right way to go about that, if you ask me. Your job title should articulate what you do, not who you work for or where you work. Outsiders to the company aren't going to know what your company's "Center for Excellence" is, so they're not going to know what a 'Center for Excellence Specialist' is.

I'd say that the best way to communicate that in email signatures and on business cards is to simply put 'Center of Excellence' under the title. If for instance, you work for 'Sandwich Co.' as a Software Developer (just hypothetical), you could put:
Bob Person
Software Developer
Center of Excellence
Sandwich Co.

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Whats in a title, I mean when the Pentium chip was released do you really think it had a meaning to it? It was just a stupid word nobody had ever heard of but its created its own brand.

Digital Innovation Specialist <---------- That's a winner

Innovation Specialist gets your point across of what you do, and Digital says where you do it.

I call bullshit all pretty much all the names, they are totally meaningless.

If you have to pick a job title then you need to pick one that people can relate to and immediately assign some (hopefully decent) value to because it's a industry wide used term. Hip job titles may sound good to you but they leave your customers clueless and frustrated.

For example, take an MBA degree vs an MFA in New Economies. What the fuck is a Masters in Fine Arts in New Economies?!? Is it Bitcoin, or developing countries, or what? An MBA is a known and people in the industry understand that folks who have an MBA went through by and large the same general coursework so there's an expectation that someone with an MBA knows about business.

You want to invoke certainty within your customers, not ambiguity.

One of my favorite shit titles is "Electron Wrangler", people who use it think that they are so cool but everyone else just thinks that they are sad individuals who are unable to even convey with any degree of certainty what it is they actually do.

Drop the hip titles and go with ones that are standard and that people immediately understand. Also, if you call yourself Innovation Specialist you better have a portfolio of actual innovations you came up with all by yourself.

Thuleman said:

Drop the hip titles and go with ones that are standard and that people immediately understand. Also, if you call yourself Innovation Specialist you better have a portfolio of actual innovations you came up with all by yourself.

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I really hate how suddenly everybody is dropping the I-word (innovation) to describe everything that ever happens, including things that are standard operating procedure. It really makes it difficult to properly distinguish and praise the true innovators for their truly innovative ideas. Brilliant ideas are going unrewarded and nobody's ever saying "See what Brian did? Let's try to be creative like he is!" because everything's being labeled as innovative and it's becoming a bit of a waste of what used to be a good word.

Cobalt2112 said:

Hi Guys,
1- We work with digital agencies to provide best practices and guidelines on how we offer web hosting to our internal brand teams.

2- We procure either dedicated or shared hosting on behalf of the agencies so that they can upload their brand or campaign pages.

3- We help debug their code when somehow it doesn't work in our environment (Linux, Windows, NewRelic, SQL, etc)

4- We provide an innovation channel and center of excellence for site acceleration services (Akamai) and cloud technologies (AWS-centric like EC2, RDS, S3, CloudSearch, DynamoDB, etc)

5- We submit apps to the Android Play and Apple app stores for the brands, on behalf of the agencies.

6- Provide digital solution architecting for complex sites (like multi-region Node.js)

Click to expand...

The titles you suggested seem primarily focused on being ostentatious rather than conveying any useful meaning. I even have a hard time understanding what the list of things your companies does means due to the same problem.

Anyway, it sounds like you could just call some of these:

1. Web Hosting Consultant / Specialist
2. Web Hosting Consultant / Specialist
3. Software Consultant / Platform Integration Specialist
4. No idea what this means? Marketing Specialist?
5. Mobile App Store Specialist
6. Website Architecture Consultant

Something like that.. I mean you might be able to phrase the above better but at least I'd have some idea what those people did.

Hi Guys,

Thanks for all your feedback. From those who suggested here, plus other team members who also requested input, the title that was chosen for the role was ....

Digital Solutions Specialist