Digital transformation hub

Customer value and adaptability means adopting an outside-in strategy: Focusing each piece of your business on creating value for your customers, and continually adapting to change. It’s an organizing principle and a mindset shift that can be applied with success to any kind of initiative. By placing the customer value at the heart of the business model, it becomes impossible to stagnate, resist change, and lag in the adoption of best-in-class tools and practices.

When it comes to technology, nearly all established organizations have a similar set of challenges and opportunities. In digitally transforming your business, it’s important to think of technology as a strategy, not just a service that ‘keeps the lights on’. This means repositioning your organization as a technology company that is focused on creating first-class digital customer experiences and meaningful business outcomes.

Product teams are the bridge between strategy and execution. They are more effective than project teams because they are focused on creating long term value for customers. In order to do this, they must be as unconstrained as possible with strong leaders in place—ready to unblock them, lobby on their behalf within the organization, and trust them to make the best possible decisions in support of the customer.

Choosing the right area of your business to focus on is a choice as individual as the business itself. You must also learn to operate in a state of constant flux, structuring your investment portfolio in an adaptive way that allocates your talent mix appropriately, and accounts for unpredictability in the planning and initiative evaluation process.

Process as a solution for unpredictability is a recipe for failure: You will not anticipate the issues you may face that easily. It is better to be flexible in the face of change rather than overly-architected. Including governance in your core workflows is much more pragmatic, and it helps your product teams work adaptively, rather than hoping you can address issues of governance, compliance and risk at the end of a product build.

How success is measured may be one of the most entrenched thought patterns in your business. Combatting this culture issue will require a focus on winning attitudes, an agreement on what is best for the future of the organization and the products you create, and an overall commitment to doing the digital transformation in the right way. That means looking at modern, digitally-relevant metrics that most accurately reflect your customer behavior.