Why your digital product strategy is now your business strategy

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David Wynne, CEO and founder, Red Badger

If someone told you they were heading into town to open a bank account, you’d probably raise an eyebrow. What was commonplace a couple of years ago now seems onerous when you can open an account in 10 minutes from your phone.

The customer experience is now almost universally digital-first – regardless of market or industry. Digital products are no longer an IT function that serves the business. They are the business. Your digital product strategy is now your business strategy.

Becoming a digital product organisation

Treating digital products as a primary business driver is a profound shift in mindset – one that requires cultural, organisational and capability change.

Unlike traditional IT projects that have a start and end date, a product is never done; it evolves with the customer and the market to deliver enduring value. Your products, and therefore organisation, are structured around uninterrupted value streams that directly connect the people responsible for delivering the products with the customer.

Teams are given the support and freedom to deliver digital solutions that truly differentiate the business. And, crucially, success is not measured by activities, timelines and budgets but by customer outcomes and business results.

The core challenges facing blue chips

While making this shift to product thinking is a business priority – in 2019, 85 per cent of organisations were adopting, or planning to adopt, a product-centric approach – the shift isn’t easy when you consider the size, scale and complexity of enterprises.

They face three core challenges:

1. Delivering a product that customers actually want and competitors aren’t delivering
2. Building a platform that enables their products to be reliably, safely and consistently delivered
3. Creating the digital capability to build and maintain products and platforms (the fight for talent is real)

Securing and retaining top talent

To make up ground on the digital natives, blue chips must attract top talent to build their digital capability.

The best product people take pride in their work. They jump out of the bed to work on products that directly delight customers (internal and external) and make a real business impact. They don’t want – or need – to work in an environment that doesn’t embrace a progressive product mindset or that makes it unnecessarily hard to be successful.

Digital native companies don’t hire 1,000 engineers for one project and then disband them at the end. They invest in lifelong teams dedicated to continuously optimising their area of the customer experience.

Experience matters

The blue chips we know and love are already digital product businesses (whether they realise it or not). There is an enormous opportunity for those who embrace this dynamic and take urgent action to transform themselves.

An experienced pioneering team, with deep technical pedigree and product design, can guide and accelerate this journey. This team understands the enterprise beast, derisking the big decisions to build the foundations to be successful over the next decade.

Crucially, they can help you iteratively deliver value from day one, not at the end of a three-year transformational programme. Given what’s at stake, there’s no time to waste.

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Originally published on Business Reporter