Your digital strategy is your business strategy
We believe that all companies are digital product businesses but many simply haven’t realised it yet. In this video, Red Badger CEO, David Wynne, explains what we mean by a digital product business and why your digital strategy matters.
(Originally posted on Business Reporter)
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
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
They face three core challenges:
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Delivering a product that customers actually want and competitors aren’t delivering
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Building a platform that enables their products to be reliably, safely and consistently delivered
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Creating the digital capability to build and maintain products and platforms (the fight for talent is real)
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➤ Securing and retaining top talent
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
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.
Our work with Blue Chip clients includes
TRANSCRIPT
David Wynne - CEO & Founder, Red Badger
We believe that all businesses are now digital product companies but many of them don't realise it yet.
I think where once you would have had a business strategy and a digital strategy. Today your digital product strategy is your business strategy.
The role of digital in blue chips has changed. We believe that all businesses are now digital product companies. Many of them don't realise it yet.
If you think about how a bank is structured, then typically the business rules are structured around the fact that they have branches so you have to go out to a branch and physically fill out paperwork and to speak to somebody and paperwork have to be filed, and so on and so on. Those rules do not apply in a digital world.
And yet many of the business rules that exist are still running as though the business is still anchored in this old physical world.
As a result of that, there's many digital natives that are entering the market that do not play by the same rules. And as such, they're able to outmanoeuvre those traditional blue chips.
Digital natives–and we all know who they are because we use them every day in our lives–they don't hire 1000 engineers, set up a project and then fire them at the end of it. They're still there evolving the product, iterating it and making it better as they understand the customer's needs.
A digital product mindset is a shift from Project thinking to Product thinking: the organisation is structured around uninterrupted value streams that directly connect the people responsible for delivering those products to the customers.
With a digital product mindset when you're building product, a product is never done, it doesn't have an end date. It's constantly evolving as you understand how your customers are using it, what they value, how the market around you is changing. That's how you deliver market leading products.
As blue chips look to make this transformation to a digital product mindset, they face three challenges. We call these product, platform, and capability.
First, you've got to build a product that customers actually want and that your competitors aren't delivering.
Second you need a platform upon which to deliver that product reliably, safely, and consistently.
And third, you need a capability. And that's about the war for talent. And if you don't have those first two points right, you won't be able to compete.
Top talent takes pride in the work they do. They want their work to be put into the hands of real customers. And to deliver value. So the lack of a product platform can become a major business constraint, making delivery of products slow, painful and expensive.
I think where once you would have had a business strategy and a digital strategy, today your digital product strategy is your business strategy.
Red Badger is the digital product transformation consultancy for blue chips. We want to come in and help deliver value for you from day one, help deliver the products your customers want, help build the platform that can deliver those products to your customers and help you build your own capability that will ultimately allow us to hand over.
So if you’re someone in a blue chip that wants to change the status quo, we can be an ally to you on that journey.
When you're working on business-critical products that you have to get right first time. That's where we excel.
Our deep technical pedigree and our product design expertise allows us to de-risk those big decisions that you've got to make that set down the foundations for the next 10 years of your business.
We always aim to deliver value iteratively as we go, not at the end of a large transformation programme. We release early and often adapting to customers understanding from the data. We're not entering into a three year transformational programme, which will typically fail at the end.
The next 10 years we're going to see unprecedented change driven by digital. The scale of funding for disruptors shows no sign of slowing, and we are going to see new challengers.
However, I believe the brands we know and love today have an enormous opportunity if they're able to adopt this digital product mindset.
Red Badger aims to play a leading role in this transformation.
How does digital product thinking apply to your business?
You’ll be amazed what you can learn about your organisation in just one hour with a Red Badger inspiration session. You won’t look back. Only forward.
ARTICLE
Transforming traditional blue chips into next generation Digital Product companies
Red Badger's new CEO, David Wynne, reflects on the challenges facing blue chips in a world of Digital Product that is leaving them behind.
The vast majority of organisations still maintain “traditional” structures, failing to grasp they are already Digital Product companies, just highly inefficient ones. Most are not yet aware it’s a problem. Inevitably some of today's blue chips will falter, failing to observe the shifting tectonic plates beneath them. No one is too big to fail…”
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