How enterprises create great digital products in 100 days

Traditional enterprises are facing problems on multiple fronts - recession, the war for tech talent, savvy startups eating their lunch, and now the cost of living crisis.

It’s on blue chip digital leaders to find a way to support customers and ensure the business remains competitive.

With high-performing digital companies pivoting and releasing on demand—achieving 48% higher revenues in the process—this is not a time to simply cut costs, put innovation on ice and hope everything will be alright. 

The companies that flourished after the 2007 recession—and through the tumultuous last few years— are those who struck a delicate balance between cutting costs and investing in tomorrow. 

Whatever you’re on the hook for—enhancing the customer experience, meeting a new market threat, improving operational efficiencies, responding to new regulations—this is your moment to show how digital products (and a digital product approach) can quickly and cost effectively hit that sweet spot.

Regardless of the challenges you're facing (legacy platforms and working practices, competing priorities, lack of alignment), there is a path forward. And it may be achievable much faster than you think. 

Break enterprise constraints 

In the face of urgency, most blue chip digital leaders find themselves tethered by enterprise complexity, constraints and predispositions: 

• Budget pressure: Cost cutting from all direction, especially for new technology-based initiatives 
• Risk-adverse culture: Fear or unease at innovation/veering from the status quo
• Talent war Battle for internal digital talent and recruiting externally
• Limited expertise: Lack of product and technical experience for rapid enterprise delivery
• Complex technologies: Unclear path to production, unwieldy processes and pipelines    
• Legacy practices: Slow, cumbersome, controlled change and compliance processes 

These key areas often dramatically slow down blue chip response times.

Yet despite these suboptimal conditions, there is a proven way to break these binds and make headway.

Break the cycle

There are myriad reasons why products miss the mark:

1. Going too soon with products built based on untested assumptions and/or with no clear definition of success. 
2. Meeting engineering challenges and making technical choices that slow down your ability to continuously release valuable features to customers at scale
3. Hitting the limits of your business model, stakeholder alignment or ways of working that interrupt value creation. 

Whatever the reason, these product failures hurt. 

An endless process of workshopping and experimenting hits an expensive dead end. A showy piece of innovation theatre with no tangible value. A rudimentary product MVP that fails to gain traction. A beautiful design but no build. An external agency that doesn’t “get” your business. 

But it doesn’t have to be like this. You can break the cycle.

Break boundaries 

There is a faster and safer way to deliver quality quickly, with lower risk, and without overpaying. It’s about a lean and thorough approach that’s focused on immediate impact. 

An approach that’s helping blue chips achieve extraordinary things at start-up speeds in the enterprise: 

• An iconic retail brand launched a merchandising product in 84 days
• A global bank deployed a new codebase to market in 56 days
• A healthcare agency created a solution and roadmap in 56 days

These are the kind of speeds that make the difference. They save you from wasting months workshopping, researching, following blind alleys, burning money and losing stakeholder support.

It’s a low-risk, high-reward option that gives you, your team and your organisation the necessary confidence that you’re heading in the right direction

While all journeys are different and there will always be nuances, you can make great strides and achieve more in days than your competitors do in months. The key is to:

• Move immediately 

Getting your team together can take time - especially when you need multiple disciplines to plan, design, build and deliver your product. Deploy and empower a small cross-functional team that has worked together before and can hit the ground running in complex enterprise environments.

• Leverage real world insight 

Avoid gut feelings, suspicions, flights of fancy - get talking, immediately, to a wide cross-section of your customers. Understand their needs, wants and desires. Arm yourself with fresh, quant and qual data to understand the most valuable problem you’re solving.

• Unify stakeholders 

Capture the imagination and attention of your stakeholders (even the sceptics) with your bold vision. Get them around a table and talking. Identify shared pain points and pain relievers. Secure their confidence, excitement and support.

• Automate paths to production

Don’t undermine all your planning, designing and aligning by hitting a technical wall. Engineer a lean and effective delivery pipeline to release quickly and continuously. Get the product in your customers' hands so you begin learning and iterating sooner.

For a more comprehensive breakdown, download our blueprint for moving fast and creating great products in the enterprise:

Seize your moment 

You don’t need, or have, a year to figure this out. You just need a spark. That first domino. Something that you know your customers truly want and that your stakeholders can’t stop talking about. 

This first product delivery is the catalyst for unleashing continuous value to customers and driving future innovation. 

It serves as your template, the first page of your new digital product playbook to orient your business around customer and business outcomes.

And from there, you can kick on as you guide your organisation’s transition to a digital product company that is nimble, close to your customers and primed to pursue the best opportunities.

Start moving faster today - See how blue chips like you are creating great products in 100 days with Red Badger.