What’s the most important thing to do if you’re an organisation wanting to accelerate transformation?
We believe all organisations are digital product organisations, whether they realise it or not. This means structuring your organisation around products and services that deliver value to customers. Transformation is accelerated when teams are formed from a range of disciplines and are given the remit and a goal to continuously create customer value.
Autonomous teams that truly understand customers and boast the engineering capabilities to build digital products and platforms at scale will move mountains. The closeness to the customer is key to designing compelling products and services. When they set a customer objective – whether it’s acquisition, share of wallet, or some other value metric, they can continuously iterate and do what it takes to deliver it. They can cut through the complexity and ‘blockers’ – for instance how to automate a new customer application from a mobile device, through compliance processes, to registration in a blue chip’s core banking platform.
You’ve got an outcome and a highly capable team organised and focused on that outcome so you’re no longer coming at it top down, thinking we need to transform the whole organisation and boil the ocean. You’re enabling this pioneering team to harness their experience and unleash their creativity to solve complicated problems that deliver customer value. I think that’s a model we see as increasingly successful to accelerate digital transformation programmes.
We believe all organisations are digital product organisations, whether they realise it or not.
How can you help clients become more agile and resilient, especially through culture and leadership?
All big, established companies have a need to develop their capabilities to build value through meeting customer expectations. This requires deploying new digital products and services that continuously improve and evolve, in addition to capability in three core areas. Firstly the products and services themselves need to be designed with an obsessive eye on value to the customer. Secondly you need to develop a technical platform capability to design, develop, run and optimise these products at scale. Continuously improving them through the insights you gain in how they are used.
And finally, and most importantly, you need the culture and leadership for this new ‘Product mindset’. One that sets customer outcomes as a core objective and then organises structures, incentives and resources around achieving them. You’ll build a business platform that’s more flexible and resilient, and teams that prioritise for customer value week by week. Agile engineering becomes agile business. As integrated teams are focused on an outcome (rather than a function) they can adapt to meet it. As circumstances change, they change.
I think it's a combination of the people and the mindset, with an approach underpinned by modern methods of engineering.
I think it's a combination of the people and the mindset, with an approach underpinned by modern methods of engineering.
How has the pandemic influenced the way your firm and your consultancy is delivering transformation services?
Before the pandemic we were fairly robust in insisting these pioneering teams had to work together in one physical room, whether that room was in our office, or a clients’. We believed it was a critical component in how to be successful. Of course, the pandemic threw that approach out of the window, overnight.
Initially there was a lot of uncertainty as we pivoted to virtual rooms. We had to learn and adapt as we tend to work on complicated problems and in complicated places, and our clients were going through the same. All our critical collaboration work, which had been through workshops, migrated immediately to digital tools like Miro boards, and we doubled our collaboration through tools like Slack.
We’ve migrated our processes, including a rich set of workshop templates and frameworks, to remote and digital delivery. A surprising benefit, on top of now working with clients across the world remotely, has been a productivity improvement. In particular as communication becomes more asynchronous we find teams naturally produce better written assets. The outputs of virtual collaboration are richer and better able to communicate specifics, which is unexpected and fascinating.
We’ve migrated our processes, including a rich set of workshop templates and frameworks, to remote and digital delivery.
JOHN GODFREY
Commercial Director
Red Badger
Red Badger is the digital product consultancy that gets you closer to your customers. Our product design and technical expertise build high performance digital platforms and embed new ways of working. Your journey to an agile, innovative digital product organisation starts today. Find out more at: www.red-badger.com