Some of these things are not like the others.

Have you heard the phrase ‘digital’ so many times it loses all meaning? Try saying it a hundred times and see if the word still sticks in your brain. If you’re like me, it’ll slide right away like a fried egg off a bald head.

Now imagine baldy over there is your company. It’s risky for a thing to be so pervasive that one cannot escape it, or mentions of it (or articles about it - no the irony is not lost).

The problem is that there is so much work out there, and so many things that could do with a digital transformation (my thoughts on that phrase here), it can be challenging to find a place to start.

As Laozi stated, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. How do we identify that first step? More importantly, how do we ensure that the thing we’ve identified is in fact, a first step, and not the first mile, the tenth mile or the hundredth mile?

Mark Rosenberg commented on a previous article. He stated that based on his experience, while you can educate the entire org on what becoming digital means, it’s often a challenge to digitally transform an extensive portfolio. Mark went on to explain that the most important thing to get right when considering what to paint with the digital brush, is defining the outcomes the business wants to see and then aligning use cases.

These comments paint the picture of a large organization looking at change, as being best served by starting small. By starting with products in verticals relevant to a business’s chosen outcomes, and the teams that look after those products, you provide people with a tangible start and endpoint, clear boundaries, and the most important thing of all;

Psychological Safety.

No betting the company, no gambling the product, no guessing the market.

Starting without psychological safety can be ruinous for your efforts to change. I’ve previously experienced executives lock up and be unable to make decisions. I’ve seen relationships between colleagues ruined because what is evident to one incites a fear-based response in another. I’ve seen trusted advisors turn in to detractors that actively try to undermine the effort to change - because they don’t feel safe! For a staff member reliant on the company for their living, the prospect of profound upheaval starts ringing alarm bells, and they aren’t bells that can be un-rung easily.

When you come to make the change, be that making digital your default proposition (what does that even mean?) or just applying a digital lens to the way you currently work, you enable staff to participate fully. You empower them to work without worrying about the blowback of a mistake made while learning.

Starting small in this way can also be kinder on your customers. Rather than presenting as a different company overnight, with diverse offerings or a different business model, we can offer a more compassionate, thoughtful approach.

Recall when the company that makes your favourite product ‘went digital’ - they turned off the call centre and switched to an online, email-only support model because it’s digital and it’s cheaper. I’m not sure what was more irritating, waiting on hold for half an hour or waiting three days for a job to be done that would usually have taken a five-minute conversation with a human. If you focus your change on the wrong things or are in it for the wrong reasons, your customers will suffer.

Thinking more about selecting that first step, though, it feels like you could approach the question from multiple angles. In heeding Mark’s advice from earlier, you need to ensure your company has set those outcomes for you to draw on. Assuming you’ve done that, you can take those outcomes and ask yourselves the following:

A Choice appears:

Of these outcomes, which one is the most valuable to our customers?

Or

Of these outcomes, which is the easiest for us to achieve as a first step?

What’s the risk?

Your answer will likely depend on your risk appetite. Personally, working to deliver the most value to customers feels like the best approach. Should you achieve that outcome, you have the best chance of your customer base, rewarding you via the bottom line. On the other hand, should this outcome not be achieved or should you not provide the right solution, you’re also much more exposed for the same reason.

Thinking back to when I had to make this choice, my focus and customers weren’t the primary revenue stream for the business. For me, in my role, ‘most valuable for Alex’ was not ‘most valuable for the business’. It was a weird time on reflection. I could take on a risk profile that was a bit more aggressive than might fit your context. While it was the most valuable thing for my area, it was a natural step for the business to take.

Where risk is a more significant concern (or perhaps when you only have one essential product that drives company revenue), the safer option is usually to tackle a smaller option. I won’t call them low hanging fruit because, in my experience, low hanging fruit tend not to exist. They are tricky problems masked by a lack of understanding or data. Instead of creating new teams or new ways of working, or creating new products that need love and investment, begin by conducting user research with a focus on that small problem. Please share what you learn and then act on it.

Early on, it’s crucial to share what you’re learning with the business and your stakeholders. Once you’ve shown the knowledge you’ve gained, deliver a change to address that knowledge. If you can show that you’re learning from stakeholders, learning from customers and then applying that to your product, you build trust with all of those parties. Importantly, you create trust in a way that is difficult to argue. The data tells all.

I chose to look at a particular feature that wasn’t working well in a product. We asked some customers and non-customers to come in for interviews, ended up with a bunch of feedback that we then took to the business. We had to challenge some folk as the feature had been designed initially based on gut feel. Engaging them as equals from a position of psychological safety meant we had a fruitful and robust conversation and were able to produce and deliver the product increment.

Snowballs get bigger as they roll

In the same way that you might snowball your debt repayments, snowball how you deliver software. By demonstrating you can create with a customer-focused approach, and by tying that to the results the business might see, it becomes a lot easier to justify more substantial changes. At the same time, you are building confidence that you can deliver that more substantial change.

None of this requires Agile, Scrum, Kanban or whatever else. It just requires talking to stakeholders, talking to customers and responding to what you learn. If you can design this feedback loop to be short, and become more responsive to the market rather than driven by a project plan, you’ll be in the right place regardless of the chosen framework you want to use.

To me, this is pure business agility. There’s no rocket science here, but it does require the things you started with, back when the business was young. It requires humility, a willingness to change and grow, and a willingness to get stuck into some problems that may be hard, ambiguous, poorly defined or a combination of those things. Big businesses can lose that mindset as they become more process and governance driven (read: risk-averse) with growth.

I mention business agility because there is an implied link between business agility and speed or pace, and pace is something that a successful digital initiative can give your business.

I believe that the hallmark of a digital business is pace. Not technology or software or design. Pace in all things. Digital transformations are lucrative because of this. Operational and organizational tempo gives corporations the ability to turn on a dime and respond to market forces, legislative changes like GDPR, crises or opportunities. Digital is eating the world. It will keep coming up again and again.

Snowballing improvements to your product or chosen outcomes demonstrate pace. We start small or start with one thing. To start big is too risky for the business. It threatens too many people needlessly. It works against the goals of the transformation.

Pace

We’re not doing digital for digital’s sake; it’s pace we want. Replacing a paper form with an electronic one doesn’t automatically please your customer. Responding to customers in minutes, rather than days certainly does though. Amazon is still selling books. The difference is that now you can access a wide variety of literature online (more then your local bookstore would have in stock), order online and reasonably expect your order to arrive in a day or two. The days of having to wait for a week are gone. That’s pace. Digital, and the technology behind digital efforts, are simply an enabler. I’m sure that nobody at Amazon will ever regret investing in getting books to customers faster. Likewise, it’s unlikely a business that has tasted pace would regret it, even given the cost.

Getting back to our research, and the action we’ve taken; start small, get the knowledge and deliver that to a user. Even if it’s a limited section of your customers, that’s still good. If you’ve done it once, do it again. Rinse and repeat. As you become more familiar with the process of learning, building and showing, this feedback loop begins to feel natural. It should start to feel better than the way you used to work. It becomes the default to ask customers about their problems and views on your product before starting a bit of work. These lessons begin to show in other parts of the organisation. The organisation begins to think more about pace and more about how they might use technology to become faster. You encounter a turning point. The default position becomes to use digital methods, channels (and the technology behind them) to solve customer problems.

Your digital transformation has begun.

In reality, it’s never as simple as this. Fortunately, by keeping your cycle time low and your work chunked as small as possible, we reduce the chance of significant problems, and hopefully, we reduce the damage any mishap might cause.

Some points to take away:

1. Your context and the outcomes you want must guide your efforts.
2. Keep the psychological safety of your colleagues in mind.
3. Make sure that the work you do aligns with the broader business.
4. Focus on the smallest thing, build trust and then tackle more significant problems.
5. Build with customers, not just with customers in mind.

Everyone wants to talk about digital-led businesses. Every business is a software business, even when they aren’t, people will tell you. But the focus on big bang, project managed, change agent-driven initiatives tend to leave sour tastes in the mouths of long-standing staff. Naive technologists or agilists or product people for that matter exacerbate this when they perform the business strategy equivalent of the ‘seagull’. Discontent frequently morphs into outright opposition, and emotion becomes the dominant decision-making force rather than observation and planning. Eventually, what good will the agent(s) had is exhausted, and they leave the business. Sometimes voluntarily, sometimes less so.

Thus ends the digital transformation — a practical exercise in how to win friends and influence people, speaking from experience.

The end goal was a digitally-led business, with a focus on experiences and the products that power them. The more I learn from others in the industry, the more I feel like this is still the right outcome. Is there a business out there today that doesn’t want the best for their customers? Is there a business that doesn’t want to shift their customers from high-cost channels to lower-cost channels, while at the same time improving the experience those customers have? Is there a business that doesn’t want to maximise the lifetime value of a customer in a way that is engaging and delightful? Even companies that might not have the words to describe this nirvana surely want that for their customers and their bottom lines regardless?

The core assumption.

The core assumption I’m making is this: Businesses want - and have always wanted - highly engaged, happy customers who pay more money for the goods and services that business provides, while at the same time reducing costs as much as they can.

The thing that differs then, is not the goal, but how we get there as a group. The big question businesses have then is not the what, but how. Is it a shift in the customer segment or vertical? Is it the pursuit of new markets in new ways while maintaining old markets and old styles? Or is it a digital transformation? How do you decide when it could be any of these, at any time and in any order?

These are the questions that every digital, agile, product, devops, rockstar ninja consultancy on the planet have solved they will say, breathlessly in the white paper you paid for with your email address. Some of the claims might even be true. I don’t believe in any of them. The majority of the movements I see in industry pros look to digital transformation as the next step for any business. The approach: Hire product owners and managers, or shift the ones you have out of the marketing department. Let them be the agents of change as surely they will rally the business around them in pursuit of the customer! Customer Obsession will carry the day! Last time someone took that approach with me, I was made redundant. From what I’ve seen such things end one of two ways. Either you force out the existing staff that built the business, or the agents of change don’t get the support or cut through they need, and they move on. Losing momentum is the most significant risk with a transformation. By definition, it has a beginning, middle and end. A transformation implies a shifting of the status quo, techies, product people, design and experience folk are hired into the business with a mandate to change the way the company has worked up until that point - because if you don’t change you don’t transform. Those newbies to the business have new ways of working, and the implication is that those new ways are inherently better or more suitable for the company than the old ways that we built the business on in the first place!

This attitude implies that the newbies are inherently better or more suited than the existing staff that built the company and a collision point arrives. These groups clash until one group wins, and one group loses. I haven’t seen a clash like that de-escalated successfully.

Why then is there such a focus on a transformation? Why are we doing to entire businesses what we now try to avoid doing with the software that we tell companies they need to be thinking about first? As an industry, we’ve been attempting to move away from big bang releases on a Friday afternoon. Why do we treat whole companies the same way now? If we can figure out how to de-risk deploying and releasing software, surely we can focus on doing something similar for businesses that want to participate in a digital-first world.

Think about integration, rather than transformation. Rather than seeking to supplant, subvert or replace, we should be looking to merge, join and integrate.

In tech we try to remove silos. Why stop there?

How many times have you seen a technology team working siloed, away from the rest of the business? The predominant practice used to be waterfall, where the teams hide down on another floor for the entire duration of the project, only coming back to show the business what they’ve done at the very end of the budgeted time. Agile and Scrum have advanced that, now we talk about what we’ve been building with our stakeholders every few weeks (two weeks being most common). That’s a great achievement compared with waterfall.

With this way of working being a next step on the journey, what comes after that? Once you’ve got mature teams experienced with this way of working, it can happen that the product owners, design team and other team members are doing regular customer research sessions. Staff process that data into insights and product improvements. Next, they build that feedback into their digital products. The new approach works up to a point.

Eventually, it becomes difficult to improve some aspects of the product because the tech team might only own the digital representation of that product. Take a bank for an example close to heart. Suppose you get some feedback in a user session that the fees charged on a product make it unattractive to the user. Your tech team is incentivised to fix problems with the digital product. Still, now you’re finding issues with the traditional representation of that product - you can take that feedback back to the bank, but you’ve just hit another silo.

We’ve come so far in building cross-functional technical teams and cross-functional software product teams. The next logical increment is the cross-functional business team. When you think about the time before ‘digital’ existed as a thing people wrote white papers about; you’re just describing a regular team as we’ve seen for most of the history of business.

You might find that this is not a case of digital eating the world, or technology changing the way we do things. Such statements are arrogant and misguided. The way we position the concept is that there is something inherently better about us and the rest of the business world is lacking. It’s like the scrawny new kid on the block hit the gym and got monstrously huge over summer and is now flexing nerd rage on the rest of their class.

We should not be seeking to replace the old world order of business; we should be augmenting it. We should not be trying to transform our lessers. We should be using our skills and technology to push the entire company forward.

A kinder, more empathetic way is needed.

Suppose we had a business team that consisted of a domain product owner, digital product owner, a couple of developers and testers, maybe an analyst, devops type person and designer. Or suppose we took an existing technical team and asked that the principal business stakeholder joined that team, co-located and contributed permanently.

That pesky fee that’s turning off your customers in digital and retail channels could be solved quickly. Whenever the digital folk were undertaking a significant software initiative, they would likely already have the backing of their crucial stakeholder. That stakeholder would already be up to speed. They would be the most prominent advocate for that team to the rest of the business. Through co-location, you eliminate a host of meetings and sync up sessions. Through a shared context, you ensure that the company is on the same page as the techies. Sprint reviews become about inspecting and adapting the backlog from a whole of business perspective, not just a technical or feature perspective. Is it more valuable to change the way the product works, or change the way we position the product on the website? Such comparisons of work become meaningful because we can find an answer, rather than being thrown out there and not picked up by anyone.

This approach is by no means a panacea. It is still hard work. The nominated business person and the team still need to learn how to work together. What might seem like an unbridgeable gulf in some places could be just a very very large chasm - bridgable but with effort. The rest of the business needs to back such an endeavour. Come from a place of equality, rather than superiority. Acknowledge that your colleagues paid for your ticket here rather than expressing surprise they haven’t choked on a peanut before now. You’ll have a much better chance of success, without resentment and without forcing anyone out of work.

What do you get for success with this, as opposed to a digital transformation? For one, you can unsubscribe from all of the consultancy mailing lists cluttering your inbox. More importantly, you’ve empowered a group of people with experience across the digital divide and set them loose on the toughest problems your business has. By working incrementally (rather than in a big bang project-driven way) you de-risk the effort. You can manage the pace and spend (reducing pressure on staff old and new, and pressure on the bottom line through less staff and hiring costs). You also ensure that all of your team are engaged and working in the same direction, not just the subset of staff who have the wind behind them.

This is just back to basics.

What’s ironic is that this way is the way all business began. There are no silos in an eight-person business. In a way, we’re just getting back to basics. There’s poetic symmetry in that somewhere.

If I owned a business, and it was my money and legacy on the line, I’d avoid a digital transformation like the plague. I’m not in that position though, so I’ll leave it to the reader to pick up the torch.