WTF is a ‘product-led digital transformation’ anyway?

Prepared by Tim Malbon at Made by Many Wednesday 28 June, 2017

Part 1 Isn’t Digital Transformation

a stupid phrase? (aka my lighthearted intro)

Great to be here talking about Digital Transformation… it’s one of my favourite subjects I’ll start by sharing some research into the semiotics of “Digital Transformation”. Yeah, I’ve been doing some research - it’s properly rigorous…

Digital Transformation

I’ve been using Google Image search – I did warn you about the rigour. But seriously, what I find fascinating is the symbolism, the symbolic themes, that come across very strongly when you do a search for the term ‘Digital Transformation’…

It’s blueFirst thing to say - like most stock photography used by businesses to talk about business, Digital Transformation is overwhelmingly connected to the colour blue…

Digital Transformation is like 99.9% blue

It’s like magicSo much of the imagery is ‘magical’. I guess because it’s such an abstract concept - so difficult to visualise… I guess that the designer who work for B2B stock image libraries don’t have a lot to go on, except that it contains this word ‘transformation’ - which maybe makes them think of Harry Potter. Whatever it is, there’s a lot of magical symbolism…

Like this guy in his suit and tie, who’s holding a kind of magical arrow

And this guy, who’s holding… err some electricity

And whatever is happening here - whatever it is it’s quite magical

And of course this GIF of a Unicorn that represents a type of billion dollar ‘transformation’

It involves fingersSo, yeah magical - but also a lot of pointing. One thing that all of these business illustrators seem to agree on is that the future is all about touch interaction.

There’s fingers everywhere.

Activate the digital transformation crystals by touching them with your ‘phone finger’

And ascending through tunnels of code towards

a bright light

Bizarrely, digital transformation is also depicted in the same way as a near death experience…

Men only

I found very few images of women ‘doing’ digital transformation. Certainly, in my research, digital transformation is very much a thing being carried out by people with penises 😟

Influenced by Tron

The whole topic is heavily influenced by the original 1982 movie ‘Tron'

I’m sure we all remember this scene when the main human protagonist, ‘Flynn’ - played by Jeff Bridges, undergoes his own ‘digital transformation’ and actually gets maliciously digitalised by a rogue computer intelligence seeking to protect itself. So ahead of its time!

Flynn gets taken into the computer world. I went to see this movie with my Dad because it was a ‘Parental Guidance’ (PG) rated film. I think it turned me on to the idea of a computer world. What’s interesting is how the symbolism and imagery is still so similar to Tron…

This is actually real…

So is this….

We’ve all felt like this…

Not really sure what this sad dehumanised outline represent

Digital TransformationReally

silly phrase

but

everyone’s d

oing it…

Part 2 The actual talk bit

Basically, we’re stuck with the phrase. You may find it awkward, but in a way it doesn’t matter because whatever you call it everyone’s doing it. Clients are appointing Chief Transformation Officers… ‘Digital Transformation’ is at the top of their shopping lists. Deal with it. I found it really hard to get over my disgust. I tried everything…

I made some badges. They say “I’m having a digital transformation right now”

I resisted the phrase - it sounded stupid and a bit naive. This is surely what the internet has always been about, right?I mean we’re 15-20 years into the most all encompassing transformation of human life… like, business people, haven’t you noticed?!

But we thought about this at Made by Many. We set up in 2007 to make new digital products and services for global corporate clients… products and services that unlock new models, experiences, growth – that are useful, and get more useful over time.

These things sat outside the campaign lifecycle and we were clear they weren’t marketing

We’d always recognised – even going way back 10 years before Made by Many when we did the same thing at other companies – that when you make a successful new digital product or service you end up changing the company you are working for.

By change I mean that when you create a successful new digital product or service (and we’ve taken 60 successfully to market over the last 10 years) you end up creating new workflow, sometimes you have to to hire and train people, you introduce new processes and methods – and it all leaves a permanent mark on the organisation you’re working for: they become more agile, more lean, more focused on the user, quicker to market – whatever it is…

Well, over the past 18 months what we’ve recognised is that the change bit is the most valuable part of what we do - and the product is just the means to an end.

So, we did what anyone would do when faced with this challenge: we simply reversed the polarity

The Product is now a by-product

The goal is transformation. We now think about the Product as a by-product.

Digital Transformation is the most urgent challenge for leaders in every business today

We’ve now bought Transformation front-and-centre - for all its flaws. This is what you’ll see at the top of our website now

Visit http://www.madebymany.com

Change by making Learn by doing Product-led transformation

What is ‘Change by making’?The way we work is to form a Lean and Agile product innovation team with our clients. It’s a cross functional team so not only does it involve clients it involves technologists, strategists, data scientists, designers and product managers from the very outset and all the way through

It’s a social and experiential model of learning. People learn best by doing - by making together - in teams.

We help companies change by getting them to do it instead of telling about it. They learn how to get things to market faster, or how to become more customer-centric by doing it instead of talking about it.

What can you learn by working like this?

•How to make innovation continuous •How to do agile planning & estimation •How to be customer-obsessed •How to experiment, prototype, and iterate •How to innovate in a way that makes ideas

testable very rapidly •How to measure progress •How to treat ideas as hypotheses to be

validated, instead of requirements simply to be delivered

•How to develop a digital mindset and product culture

A breakthrough digital product in your customers’ hands within 100 days

To add to the list - crucially, they also learn: • How to work fast • How to fail fast • How to learn fast

Product’ is a catalyst and lever for big change

‘

As we saw from my rigorous Google Image research at the start, transformation as an idea suffers from being too abstract and ambiguous. Product turns change into a tangible object around which people can rally and work together, to learn practically what they need to be able to do, and how they need to work and behave in the future.

Transforming into what?What’s t

he ‘end state

’..?

We think that one of the reasons ‘Change by making’ succeeds is because the ‘end state’ for any digital transformation project probably looks quite similar to the way a Lean and Agile product innovation team works. The end state for any digital transformation is a set of ongoing capabilities, the ability to do transform continuously as the world, markets and consumer behaviours all continue to evolve. The end-state is the ability to thrive in this environment, and not get broken by it

Some characteristics of the end-state are…

Self-organising, cross-functional teamsStrategy, Technology, Data science, Product Design, Product Management

Continuous innovationNot a one-off, a continuous behaviour

Customer-centricA shared commitment to CX/EX at every level of the org

Lean, Agile and ‘full-stack’ Rapid, adaptive, ‘competitive advantage of less’

Intentional, managed org changeBuilding new capabilities, embedding new structure, processes and culture

What ‘The Product’ can’t do on its own

The product, and the experience of making it together and operating it, undoubtedly change things profoundly and make you more digital. This sort of project can plug into and embed within a broader transformation initiative, and act as an accelerant. The product is a catalyst and a vehicle for making change happen. It forces change, but it might not get you all of the way there on its own. We believe that you also need to support it with coaching, learning and development, tons of storytelling and communication, community-building (communities of practice) and deliberate organisation redesign.

What does that look like?

But when you get it right, the invention, creation and development of new product can take you a long way very quickly - it adds momentum, reality and self-belief. It leaves ‘traditional’ change looking a bit toothless, a bit like a simulation of something that needs to be real to work. I’m going to very quickly tell you about a project we’ve been working on with a well-loved global brand for just over a year. It’s an Employee Experience. We had working software in the hands of this company’s staff within 6 weeks. Last week we released the app to al 15,000 of their UK employees.

A well-loved, global fast casual dining brand

Employee Experience Product-led

transformation from outset

Co-designed Fast

Start small & iterate

Power of community Deliberate

change

Designing a new EX

immediately gets you into

redesigning behaviours

and org

This project was conceived

by client exec team as…

…With end users

throughout6 weeks to MVP in one

restaurant, 12 to MLP in

two; scaling to five, then

thirteen etc

Very focused on most

obvious value first to build

relationship foundation

plus what I said is in these boxes

Two-way process that

harness the power of manyProduct-led process backed up by coaching,

process redesign and org redesign

So, that’s a good project. It’s impact upon real people and the org - that we are continuously measuring - has been really positive. All good, and I don’t want to bring you down but ‘Digital Transformation’ is a morally neutral term. There are no values attached to it. It can be used for good or for evil.

Good and Evil

dronesLike for example the digital transformation of the ancient human pursuit of warfare and killing. Already AI is being used to process video that humans don’t have time to look at and deliver potential targets for human analysts building kill-lists.

I’m sure no-one here is working on autonomous killing systems, but…

Umair Hacque

“Mara’s boss sits in the back. Monitoring all twelve, or fifteen, or twenty people that work in the store. On a set of screens.

A drone-pilot… piloting a fleet of human drones…pressure-selling disposable mass-made shit…”

Bad Words on Medium

This is a post by Umair Hacque about his friend who has two graduate degrees but ended up in a retail job where she wears an ear piece through which her boss directs her how to sell to people, using an AI assisted sales system designed to exploit human weaknesses to sell them stuff they don’t want or need

Umair Hacque

“[Mara’s job is to] wage advanced psychological warfare… on her customers.

If Jeffrey Dahmer, Rasputin, and Michael Bay designed a “store” together, they couldn’t do any better.”

Bad Words on Medium😦

Transform or wither Digital springtime saves you Product seeds will grow*

H A I K U

And, following that supremely depressing ending, I’ll leave you with a haiku that is a brilliant and economic way to explain our approach to driving digital transformation through the experience of collaborative making of digital products ….

*You get a game-changing new product and you get a product-driven transformation for free 👻