How to feed the need for digital speed
— Reducing time to market for digital strategies
In a world where disruption, the death of dinosaurs and digital transformation is mentioned in every board room, it’s more than surprising that so many of the mentioners talk so little about the how.
Because we are at an impasse. In the world of software development, continuous delivery is a key to speed. But the processes in use today are more than struggling to incorporate customer experience, design and communications on the level that organisations—and their customers — demand. At the same time, in the world of communications and design, people are nowhere near delivering continuously.
In other words, to increase the velocity in your digital transformation, it’s time for a mash-up. We need to get the people in communications and design to stop trying to do everything perfect before they launch. While we get the people in software development to embrace customer experience.
The solution is one and the same for strategy and product development: Repeated data driven prototyping. Let me explain why and how.
Twist and shout
Of course it’s difficult to hear anything when there are twenty gurus on the dozen, all of them screaming at the same time about growth hacking, inbound, lean start-up and all the other buzzwords. Especially since many of the philosophies only focus on parts of the organisation, slash exclude key functions in the customer interaction.
Not a few of the traditional evangelist hawking popular methodologies from software development, fail on a regular basis to acknowledge that customer experience is one of the strongest drivers in product development and digital communication. If not the strongest. This #fail shows up in two ways:
a) Most processes don’t concern themselves so much with what goes on before the creation of user stories. So how are they created? And how do you make sure that you capture not only business value but also customer value?
b) Design processes are intrinsically different from engineering ditto. So even if agile processes are excellent (or fundamental) for continous delivery of code, they have a problematic relationship with design thinking.
Or we can choose to approach this from the other perspective. Departments responsible for communications and design still have a problematic relationship with time. In most organisations, these departments still work like they did before digital. Before the speed of change was what it is now. In other words, even when they work with digital — regardless if it is content for digital channels, apps or whatever — they are not rewarded with the potential of digital. Because they still work in big, long and monolithic projects where decisions become very difficult because everything has to be right when the project is released. The punch in the gut here is of course that with the world around them changing as fast as it does, that long project is seldom right when it sees the light of day.
So digital transformation, or whatever you choose to call it, isn’t about certain technologies. Because they will change. It’s about how you work.
“If we talk design and communications, they have generally not moved to a world of continuous delivery, even though the digital world gives us the tools for that in those fields as well.”
When communication became software
No, we’re not talking about bots doing the communication for you. Nor are we interested in computers buying the crap advertising space for you and calling it programmatic. Instead, reflect on what the simple shift from traditional channels to digital really means? There are two major issues:
- Your own channels have become more important than others.
- In your digital channels — regardless if they are apps or your site — functionality, design, branding and communications are blended into one and the same customer experience.
But, as we’ve said, most communication and marketing departments are nowhere near continous delivery, but treat the new world exactly like the old. I.e. they run long and big projects and they spend most of their available resources before they get any feedback from the customer. This is why they get disrupted. Because they are treating digital just as new ‘channels’ and the process leading up to ‘publication’ is the same as before.
This is the core of digital transformation—merging the old worlds of communications with the new worlds of digital development. Communications and branding need to realise that the customer experience within an app or a digital channel is what the tv ad used to be. And they have to start deliver this experience continously. At the same time, the people responsible for digital need to realise that a world class experience design doesn’t happen automagically just because you’re using a buzzword methodology.
So how does it happen?
Fast prototyping just got faster
Don’t get us wrong. It’s not like we think we are punting the best new thing since sliced bread. Or that we’ve found a unicorn. (Only a way of creating unicorns, pun intended…) Others have seen the same problem and tried their hands at solutions. Maybe most notably, Google Ventures described their Design Sprint in this year’s Sprint by Jake Knapp, Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky. And although it’s a big step in the right direction — acknowledging that the big, hairy customer attraction problems won’t get solved during the daily grind of GV:s fairly high profile bunch of start-ups — this sprint isn’t something you can implement continuously. You go from defining the problem on a Monday to testing a prototype on Friday. That’s fast going. And it’s a great attempt at ‘design ahead’. But since it demands the full week’s full time of all the stakeholders, including the CEO, it’s more like the best solution workshop you ever ran. But you won’t get access to those kind of people on a regular basis. It’s not something all your teams can do every week.
Incidently, doing something every week is exactly what Ed Catmull talks about in Creativity Inc. And how Pixar’s success rests on their ability to build and retain a culture of trust and daily creative iterations. Actually, they work in a more agile way than most tech companies and for the methodology fanboys, it should be an interesting lesson to learn how they have less knowledge about what they are doing this week than they have about the week leading up to the Holidays three years from now.
And there we have it. If we take the build out of the regular development cycle, while at the same time deleting the strive for perfection, for knowing in advance what is ‘right’, from the design cycle, we are on to something. Then your fast prototypes can attain a higher speed. But there’s even a more attractive dimension.
“For lack of better words, we call it Repeat Design for now. As in designing strategy, service design, product design and customer experience design.”
Prototype your digital strategy
If you’ve already made the leap and understand that you can prototype your communication before producing it ‘for real’, then you realise that you could also protoype your strategy. In other words, test bits of it, create hypothesis, validate them or watch them fail. Ideate, test, learn, repeat. Until you’ve learnt enough to implement. And then, and only then, you apply the full production resources to what you were learning about.
This gives you two advantages. And the combination of them is something of a paradox:
- You get faster speed to market.
- You also get higher cost efficiency for your communications, product and customer experience development.
Normally, we are used to having to pay a premium on speed. In the old world, it would cost you more to go faster. But that is the beauty of digital channels. Because they reduce the cost of a customer dialog, if you use them for prototyping you can decrease the length of the feedback loop. We have been using the process with pretty interesting results and we would like to hear what you think.
