Prototypes sell the dream
People love to see things bought to life and marketing/digital teams are having great success taking digital prototypes into the board room. They are often glossy and show how the brand will appear as well as the top level user experience which achieves a big business goal. It’s not then unusual to get the response ‘I want it. I want it just like you’ve shown… when can I have it?’.

The dream starts to crumble
The team come away full of excitement with their mandate to deliver. This is where the problems start, with other teams often not engaged. The technology teams take a look and say things like ‘where are you pulling that stock data from?’ and ‘that page will be slow, it needs to integrate with 6 different systems’. The user experience team say things like ‘it looks compelling but how does the end to end experience work and what happens in scenario x or y’.
The digital team feel the negativity, but it’s usually just frustration and people thinking how a more compelling dream could have been shown to the board if only everyone had worked together as a team.

Three core components are the route cause of the issue
The compelling dream which has been sold to the board has not considered three core elements together. These are:
1) How do we want the brand to appear?
2) How do we want to the end to end user experience to work?
3) How can technology be embraced to enable and inform the brand and customer experience?

To overcome the issue teams from across these areas need to work together. This also poses an opportunity to suppliers, nearly all of whom operate in one or two of these core components only.

Suppliers focus on one element, maybe two
- You have the big consulting firms who classically focus on technology, capability and functionality, who are moving into the customer experience space.
- You have the brand/advertising agencies who are strong on brand and now moving into the customer experience space.
- You have the customer and user experience experts who are shifting into the technology and integration space.

How about a supplier that did all three of these things brilliantly and were able to work with companies to create compelling prototypes which consider all these elements? And how about companies that creat cross functional teams not just in delivery, but right up front in the idea and innovation stage? I know a few who are starting to do this but they are few and far between...