Wall-papering the living room while the hallway burns?

Welcome back to our 5 Top Challenges for Digital Leaders series!

This week we’re moving on to talk about digital channel strategy and how to optimise your investment in digital transformation.
 
The first question to ask yourself is are you working on the right things?
 
When we talk with CDOs and CIOs we often hear that new digital features aren’t being used as much as predicted. Transformation leaders tell us that achieving value from their new feature investments is often hit and miss. The things that they thought would be winners with customers can sometimes be of less interest to users than more banal improvements.
 
So, what’s going on and how do you really get the right focus on your digital roadmap?

One: Your customers are just not that into you.

​To be fair they’re probably not that into your competitors either. There are exceptions to this of course but usually digital and transformation teams are a lot more involved in the finer points of their digital product or service than their customers. Customers may simply not notice the changes you are releasing. Some well-placed and targeted reminders can go a long way to highlighting new features.

Two: Are you fixing the things that are really bugging your customers?

​The wonderful thing about customers is that they will tell you clearly and frequently exactly what it is that annoys them about your digital service. This information is remarkably easy to access, even without in-channel feedback mechanisms (although those are good too). App store reviews, social media, customer calls or chats. You just have to listen and act accordingly.
 
If you have a significant product shortcoming or a feature that is a major pain point for users then it is usually pointless releasing new features that don’t address the bigger issues. I like to think of this as trying to wallpaper your living room whilst your hallway’s on fire. Deal with the fire first before attempting to add new furnishings.

Three: Are you keeping up with your competitors?

At some point in your digital journey you’ll need to decide if you’re leading the market or simply maintaining parity with the market and either of these strategies or a combination of both (we’ll lead in service X but maintain parity for service Y) can be valid strategies.
What you don’t want to do is fall significantly behind the market because it’s then very hard and expensive to catch up.
This raises the question about how do you work out who the market is and what counts as market parity? Your digital roadmap can’t be at the whim of everyone you’d consider a competitor.

One way to gauge market parity is to keep a running monitor of activity and common features:

1. Write a list of significant competitors in your market, (what’s significant depends on your industry but each competitor needs at least 5% market share I would think). 
2. Find someone in your organisation who has a relationship with that competitor or ask people to sign up with them. (For B2B you may need to cast the net wider to family and friends). Ask them to let you know about the core features of the product and then keep you posted regularly about new features being released.
3. Publish a monthly report card about how your features track against competitors’ offerings. When a substantial* number of competitors (or a substantial percentage of the market) offers functions that you don’t, you are falling behind the market.

​(*“Substantial” will depend on your industry but generally if a number of competitors are offering a number of features that you don’t have, you are behind the market – unless of course your strategy is to lead the market and you’ve moved on to better features all together).
 
If you’re in the enviable position of not having competitors, then you need to widen your perspective to adjacent industries, or similar organisations offshore.
 
One final thought on this - when you’re compiling your list of competitors add a couple of wild cards – new players, adjacent industries or the Apples/Googles/Amazons of the world. The act of thinking about where disrupters may take your industry can be a great focus for working out what’s really important now for your digital roadmap.

Four: is it a fad or a trend?

When you’re surrounded by technophiles it’s fairly easy to be caught up in the excitement of new technology. But how do you know if a new capability is here to stay or not?
 
If you have an innovation or emerging tech team, of course they will want to check out the possibilities of new tech (that’s their job) but should you use some of the precious space in your digital roadmap to release it to your customer base?  
 
A crystal ball would be extremely helpful but in lieu of that here’s some questions to ask:
 

1. Is there a critical mass of customers who can use this tech now or shortly in the future (eg with the next iPhone release)?
2.  Is there a tangible benefit for users from using this new tech? (Does it make things faster, cheaper, more convenient or in some other way better?) 
3. Are customers already using this tech or something similar in another industry?

 
If you can answer yes to at least two of these, then it’s worth considering this new capability for your roadmap.

Of course, whether a new feature is desirable to your customers is only one part of the equation of what a good roadmap looks like – there’s also what’s viable for your organisation and feasible for you to actually build. We’ll talk about that over the next few weeks.
 
See you next time
 
Liz
 
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