Achieving Digital Maturity using the Digital Mission Canvases
What are the Digital Mission Canvases?
For many organisations, Digital Transformation requires that they establish multiple product teams working in harmony to achieve outcomes for customers, for partners and for the business. However, there are considerable challenges in orchestrating the delivery of multiple products in large organisations.
The Digital Mission Canvases (see below) have been developed to address these challenges. The canvases were developed during research for my MBA dissertation. You can read more about that research here.
The canvases enable alignment between the goals of the organisation, and the goals of the product families and individual product teams. The canvases are designed to enable the right balance of product team autonomy: Each team uses the canvas to articulate how their own goals and activities will contribute to the larger product family and organisation goals.
The Canvases use OKR’s (Objectives and Key Results) which is a framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes. OKRs were developed in Intel by Grove (1983), and are used by leading software companies such as Google, Uber and Linkedin. It is recommended that these canvases are updated every quarter, which is the ideal time period for using OKR’s (Davies, 2019). The canvases should be printed out A1 or A0 and completed in a workshop. The canvases should then be displayed prominently so each team can view their objectives for the next 90 days. At the end of this period, a workshop is held to reflect on the successes and to update the objectives and results.
There are three Digital Mission Canvases: the Organisation Canvas, the Product Family Canvas and the Product Team Canvas (see all three below). The Organisation Canvas should be completed first by the digital leadership team and is designed to enable the team to articulate the organisation’s high-level digital mission. The canvas is divided into the three dimensions of digital transformation: the customer, the business and the technology. Users fill in the canvas to articulate the objectives of the organisation on each of these three dimensions and then specify a series of Key Results for each dimension which can be measured over the specified timeframe.
The second canvas is to be completed by a steering committee for each product family / division (usually including business stakeholders, the Lead Product Manager, the Lead Technologist and the Lead Designer), to articulate those organisational goals on a more granular level, as they relate to that product family.
Finally, having seen and discussed the other two canvases, each product team completes a Digital Mission Canvas for their product. The product teams can also use the canvas to capture their dependencies on other product teams, and the services and APIs they are building. This will enable leadership and architects to understand the dependencies and integrations between each product team.
The Digital Mission Canvases enable the organisation to continuously improve on all three dimensions of digital. Customer experience will continuously improve and become more integrated; technology will increasingly evolve and become more integrated across the organisation, and each team will pursue and achieve business goals and objectives which feed up into the goals set by the senior team. Product teams will feel connected to a greater mission, but will also have the autonomy required to build great software and services.
The Digital Mission Canvases
Digital Mission Canvas (Organisation Level)
Digital Mission Canvas (Product Family Level)
Digital Mission Canvas (Product Team Level)
