The Exam Question Has Changed - and most businesses are still answering the old one

I keep finding myself in meetings where someone announces, with real confidence, that the business is “going to do omnichannel this year.” That’s the entire brief. It has about as much strategic clarity as saying “we’re going to do digital transformation” – which, as we all know, has never not worked out brilliantly.

The thing is, I don’t doubt the ambition. The ambition is always there. The ideas are there. The technology is absolutely there. And yet so many businesses are still delivering experiences where you can only redeem your loyalty points in one channel, where click-and-collect sends you to a dimly lit corner of the store with a kiosk and a queue but no human, and where signing up for the exciting new in-store experience means creating an entirely separate account from the one you use to buy things online. We’ve all felt it. The question worth asking is: why?

Technology is no longer the slow part

I’ve spent the best part of fifteen years working with large, complex organisations to build digital products and services – across retail, financial services, public sector and beyond. And the shift I’m seeing right now is genuinely unprecedented. I recently heard it suggested that software engineering is “basically solved.” I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, but the direction of travel is clear.

We’re now in a world where AI agents can take customer feedback directly from your service channels, prototype new experiences against your existing code base, run overnight, and present you with a pull request to review by morning. The tooling available to product and engineering teams would have felt like science fiction not long ago. The infrastructure is commoditising. The barriers to building are falling away.

Which means the bottleneck has moved. Technology is not going to be the slow part of your transformation. People are. And how we organise, prioritise and make decisions as humans inside businesses – that’s where the real work is now.

We’re answering the old exam question

Here’s what I think is the most important thing to understand about this moment: the exam question has changed.

Most organisations I work with are using AI and modern tooling to optimise existing journeys. How do we make the checkout faster? How do we reduce friction in onboarding? How do we automate this process that currently takes four weeks and a spreadsheet? These are perfectly reasonable questions. But they’re the old exam.

The new exam is: now that you have all of this capability, what should you actually be trying to achieve? Not “how do we plug AI into what we’ve got,” but “how do we reimagine the end goal now that we know what’s possible?” 
It’s a fundamentally different orientation. One is about incremental improvement within existing constraints. The other is about stepping back and asking whether the constraints themselves still make sense.

I’ll give you a concrete example. When we started working with Nando’s, the vast majority of orders were placed at a physical till in a restaurant. The initial challenge was a loyalty programme that needed digitising and an ordering system that needed re-platforming. Reasonable, bounded problems. But we didn’t just rebuild what existed in a digital wrapper. We used the opportunity to build a core infrastructure that gave them complete ownership of their customer data, a single view of the customer across every channel, and the flexibility to plug in or swap out third-party providers as the business needed. We reimagined what the ordering and loyalty experience could be if you started from customer outcomes rather than existing systems.

The result was a complete inversion. The majority of orders are now made digitally through Nando’s own platforms. When the pandemic hit and restaurants had to pivot overnight between dine-in, collection and delivery, the foundations were already in place. That wasn’t planned for a pandemic – it was the natural consequence of building around customer value rather than channel-specific solutions.

Omnichannel is not a project. It’s an organising principle.

One of the traps I see organisations fall into is treating connected customer experience as a deliverable. Something you can put on a roadmap, resource for a quarter, and tick off. In reality, it’s a characteristic of really good products and services. It needs to be baked into everything you do – not bolted on.
And the reason it’s so hard is not technical. Seamless, connected experience touches every part of a business: every department, every budget line, every stakeholder, every store team, every system. When I’m buying a pair of trainers, the shoes are designed by R&D, customer insight is captured by a different team, campaigns are run by marketing, the POS is managed by technology, customer service picks it up when something goes wrong, and loyalty sits somewhere else entirely. Nobody owns the whole journey. Everybody owns a piece.

Which is why the most impactful change I’ve seen doesn’t come from better technology. It comes from organisational redesign. Structuring teams around customer outcomes rather than departmental functions. Aligning goals across channels so that stores and digital aren’t competing with each other. Running a single P&L so that success in one channel isn’t treated as a threat to another. These are people problems, not technology problems.

The ivory treehouse problem

There’s a pattern I see in almost every large organisation I work with. Decisions about what should be built get made at the top of the business – what I’d call the ivory treehouse – and then get thrown over the wall to delivery teams to execute. The people closest to customers, the ones working in stores, managing service channels, actually using the products, are the last to be consulted and the first to deal with the consequences. The best transformations I’ve been part of have inverted this. Rather than separating strategy from execution, we’ve built core multidisciplinary teams who lead on the end-to-end customer journey across every part of the system. Not temporary project teams, but a brain trust that accumulates the depth of knowledge to make the difference between a good product and an exceptional one.

Crucially, these teams don’t just design in a studio and ship to production. They get out into the real environment – testing taped-together prototypes with real customers, recording the sessions, and using the footage as advocacy material back to leadership. The customers do the selling, not the consultants.
This is what I mean when I say the exam question has changed. It’s no longer enough to have brilliant strategists making brilliant slides in a boardroom. You need people who can move between strategy and execution, between the big picture and the cable sticking out of the till that nobody thought about.

Four things that actually move the needle

If I had to distil what I’ve learned about making this work, it comes down to four shifts:
Design for outcomes, not touchpoints. Stop mapping individual journeys and start mapping the end-to-end experience you want customers to have. Optimise for the whole, not the parts. This sounds obvious, but it requires a genuine change in how you fund work, measure success and organise teams.
Treat change management as a strategic capability. Not an afterthought, not a comms plan, not a training deck. The organisations that get this right invest in change leadership at every level – from executive sponsors who genuinely champion new ways of working, to store managers who are empowered and incentivised to adopt them. Over-communicate why you’re doing things, not just what you’re doing.

Experiment early, often and scrappily. Don’t wait for perfection. Put things in the hands of real customers and real frontline staff as soon as you possibly can. Put changes live to a fraction of traffic over a weekend and review results on Monday morning. Run design sprints, test in head office, set up in a store for an afternoon – whatever gets you real feedback fastest.

Align goals across channels. Get everyone working towards the same North Star. Share omnichannel KPIs. Run a single P&L where you can. Reward cross-channel success. If your stores and your digital team are measured on different things, they will optimise for different things, and your customer will feel it.

People are the superpower

I realise this might sound counterintuitive coming from someone who works at a digital product consultancy. But the technology has never been more capable, more available, or more affordable. What’s scarce is the human capacity to reimagine what we’re trying to achieve and to reorganise ourselves to deliver it. The strategists and change agents who can take hold of what technology makes possible and put it into play – they’re the ones who are going to win. Not the teams with the biggest budgets or the most advanced tech stacks. The ones who can get the right people in the right places, asking the right questions, and moving fast enough to keep up with what’s now possible.

I keep going back to those meetings where someone announces the big omnichannel initiative. The ambition is real. The technology is ready. The question is whether we’re brave enough to reorganise around the answers.