What does it take to be a Direct Company and to scale at the same time?

In the age, where digital is not just a cool tech term, but it is a lifestyle and represents a brand’s care and attention towards customer engagement and connection, it’s important for companies to have a ‘Digital and Direct’ mindset. Our current customer sentiments are often based on emotions such as how easy it is to use a product and how quickly transactions and issues get resolved. Operational efficiency and user experience has never been more important than today, where it holds the power of making or breaking a brand’s reputation, even when the product is the best in the class. In the age of digital transformation, modern customer expectations create new sets of challenges for long-established companies that are  used to operating in a certain way.

Change is huge and disruptive

The complexity of digital transformation varies by the business models supported by the company and the complexities in its revenue generating streams. It’s essential for companies to carefully evaluate and define the objectives and goals and let it sink into the DNA of its employees.

It’s also essential for the executive leadership to align on the common objective and consider customer and employee experience at the core of the transformation.

This is where product mindset and a strong product operating model can set the course for companies to become successful in their journey of digital transformation.

Building a product culture

Companies that have led a successful digital transformation, have a strong product DNA and are customer centric. It’s important to understand what a customer is. Is it just defined as a person who is paying to buy  software? Does it also include the employees who are responsible for building and selling the software? Does it also include the employees who support the customer? The answer is “all of them”. A digital transformation is only successful when it’s revolutionizing the way the internal ecosystem operates in addition to the customer ecosystem.

“Empowered” product teams are champions for both employees and the customers’ voice, so they  play a vital role in this journey. Product teams bring to the table a unique combination of talent that includes technology,industry, and user sentiments. There are a thousand ways to solve a problem, and, in a nutshell, digital transformation is a big problem that many product teams need to solve as one big product team.

Building a product strategy

All companies like Tesla, Amazon, Apple, and Netflix to name a few revolutionized the industry by believing in their product and executing a product strategy to achieve the results. Jeff Bezos famously said in an interview in 1999 for CNBC “Obsess over customer experience.“ In the same interview he further acknowledged that Amazon’s future plans were very complicated and involved risks.

Investment in a product operating model and building a product strategy helps in creating awareness, bringing alignment across the board, and coming to a clear understanding of the problem you are trying to solve and for who. Product strategy allows companies to generate and operate on data.

Some of the key investments that should be made are:

Do not underestimate the power of discovery

Discovery is the basis of strong product foundations and allows users to understand the problem statement thoroughly. In cases of business transformation, a thorough discovery is a must to understand.

Employee experience

Understand what goes in to deliver a good customer experience.

What are the employees doing currently to support the customers? Who do they work with internally and externally? How do they sell? What is their biggest pain point? What does success look like for them? What do they need to support the scale?

A clear understanding of a day in the life of all different personas helps document the problem statement from an employee’s perspective.  Remember, a company can only successfully support a customer if it’s able to support its customer engaging teams at scale.

Customer experience

Any transformation should be a seamless experience for the customers and experiences should only change in a positive way. A customer should not experience any delays due to changes in back-office integrations. Their purchase and access experiences should not degrade, and their support requests should get resolved even faster. Well, easier said than done. ☺

This is where a thorough discovery combined with the power of UX, engineering and functional product teams help paint a realistic picture of the problem, how important it is and when it can be solved. A good discovery also helps identify cross team dependencies that often get overlooked and become a bottleneck in the later stages in the execution phase.

Use the OKR framework

Objectives and key results framework are a proven way to define and measure goals. These can span over multiple teams and provide  clear insights into the progress. OKR structure also provides knowledge regarding what is needed to deliver objectives.

Build the correct product team structure and set teams for success!

Transformation is a team game, and a healthy team with balanced representation can do wonders. Organizations should be careful before embarking on journeys that require commitment and ensure that they have the correct infrastructure to achieve its  goals. They should also  invest in the right skill sets at the right time. A healthy product team is where you have product, UX and engineering skill sets represented to match the domain and users they are serving. Any imbalance in the team structure can severely impact the progress they make. One can also say proper representation is nutrition for the team.

Empowered decision making

Product teams are best equipped to guide organizations at every stage as they hold  enormous amounts of data collected by doing user interviews, benchmarking, market analysis, and looking at industry dynamics. Product teams then use this data to guide the leadership to take approaches that best suit the customer experience. Product teams should be empowered to change course and take decisions supporting the product and users.

Measuring success

Transformations are often multi-year goals for enterprises and are very strategically executed considering the brand’s image.

Product teams keep continuously releasing new capabilities or features to support this strategy and excite users. Measuring user sentiment, NPS, CSAT are key to understanding how the customers are reacting to the transformation and new experience.

Summary

Becoming a “direct” company is a massive digital transformation for any company and can disrupt a brand’s reputation if not done properly. It’s essential to consider the product operating model at the center and empower product teams to identify and solve the problems by using core product principles. In addition, it’s also a responsibility of the leaders to have a product mindset and support product teams to meet the company’s objectives.