In today's digital world, instant gratification is everything, where a poor online user experience can be the difference between winning and losing in the digital world. To keep up with heightened product expectations, businesses must focus on creating customer-centric applications. Fast. But how does an organization ensure it does not acquiesce to the pressure to move perpetually faster at the expense of delivering a quality product that delights the customer? What we need is a cultural revolution in the engineering world — one that keeps the customer at the center of everything we do.
The Unexpected Customer Advocate
Engineers and developers used to work deep within the organization in an often isolated capacity. Now, they’re more front-and-center with more customer data and insights than many others in the organization. As a result, this traditionally execution-focused group has catapulted into taking part in decisions that affect the entire business. After all, experimentation with new application features and rollouts means they’re working with real-time customer behavior data on a daily basis. Who better to ask whether customers are loving your new application than the folks tasked with building it?
When it comes to delivering the next killer application feature, it can’t be just about speed, and we’ve learned that the hard way. Unfortunately, the reality is that plenty of applications delivered today have little to no business value. But, thanks to product experimentation, development teams now have the ability to test, adjust and roll back features based on real-time customer data, and businesses now have direct visibility into the success of their investment through the eyes of its engineers.
Creating A Culture Of Continuous Improvement
As development-cycle times shrink, more modern and iterative approaches are imperative. Today, we can measure the impact of change on business and/or engineering metrics in real time. Lean software development has allowed IT teams to move faster than ever. In an effort to keep up, teams began to tackle challenges one piece at a time. By working in very small increments, the feedback loop became faster and more efficient. By bringing in more people to make incremental decisions, teams found that they could keep the process moving forward without getting stuck in a bottleneck of approvals that traditional processes left to leadership, causing a slowdown in development cycles.
As business leaders, we must learn from this iterative approach — one that assumes both that ongoing evaluation of success is part of the process and that the entire team has a hand in contributing to progress. By facilitating a culture of continuous improvements, we have an opportunity to change business models to decentralize decision making, encourage experimentation and foster leaders throughout the organization.
Not every idea cooked up in the boardroom works in practice, and that’s OK. It’s more important to be flexible and constructively critical of your own ideas than to be tied to a product roadmap not aligned with ongoing customer feedback and usage data. Experiment early and often, understand what works, and don’t be afraid to scrap things that appear to be providing little benefit -- or worse, that could adversely impact your customer’s experience.
At today’s pace of business, managers can’t keep tabs on every last detail of the business, so trust and empower your team to make good decisions. And, thanks to high-quality and real-time data, it’s easier than ever to trust that those decisions are right for the business. Imagine the innovations that could be around the corner if we all focus a little more on continuous learning and always keep the customer at the center of our business goals.
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