There’s a tremendous value businesses unlock when leadership teams invest in building digital products and services. And yet, a recent article from Harvard Business Review noted that most digital transformations—as many as 95%—end up failing.
Why?
When McKinsey studied digital transformation (DX) in 2018, they found that one factor influenced success above all. When “management teams established [a] clear change story for transformation,” they noted, the DX initiative was over three times more likely to succeed. No other factor influenced the success rate nearly as much.

The fact is that building a clear vision that guides  the prioritization of the product roadmap in digital product development is no easy task. Luckily, company decision makers no longer have to go it alone when envisioning the path to profit. Strong strategic internal partnerships with agencies like EMERGE can build an alignment that enhances the DX success rate with much-needed expertise.

Why Partnerships Bring Digital Success

When leadership teams envision a new digital product or service, it’s often the internal IT teams that are charged with making it happen without the necessary foundational work. This method of initiating a product leaves teams without a clear vision and roadmap is part of why so many digital transformations fail.

IT departments spend 56% of their budgets on maintenance—only 18% goes to new business capabilities, according to a 2020 Deloitte study. While the vast majority of these teams are highly capable, the simple fact is that they’re not structured to handle the additional work of managing roadmaps that focus on delivering continuous value—much less planning, building, and maintaining the product itself.

Partnering with a digital product agency like EMERGE sets companies up on a path to success by leveraging experience. The traditional slow process of aligning vision to internal capability becomes streamlined and can be far more effective with a knowledgeable external team on-board. EMERGE’s experts can build alignment from day one, and bring on board the knowledge and expertise needed to truly thrive.

The Customer Advantage

Business leaders know that a digital product’s success depends on the customers. This long-held business maxim is only growing more important, as 81% of customers say they want more self-service options when engaging with a company.

Digital products can offer this utility to the customer, yet if the value isn’t there for the end user, the service ends up becoming another unsuccessful DX. The highest performing organizations and teams are embracing concepts like Product-Led Growth (PLG) that focus on aligning all functions of the organization to reduce the cost of customer acquisition and maximize retention. 

Aligning a product roadmap to the customer’s needs requires an end-to-end digital strategy process, one that’s defined by a few key factors:

• Vision alignment. From the very start EMERGE ensures all stakeholders have the clarity and focus needed to drive effective development. Business and user outcomes are considered in tandem to maximize the final product’s success.

• Data-driven decisions. Data doesn’t just inform the choice to build a digital product or service. At every stage of the development process, iterative data from testing, validation, and analysis continues to drive product goals and make improvements along the way to meet the needs of customers.

• Continuous optimization. Long-term product roadmaps benefit from the years of experience a firm like EMERGE can bring to the DX process. By implementing optimization measures across the end-to-end process, companies benefit from a product or service that’s ready to scale alongside their operations.

Why EMERGE’s Experience Matters

The gap between idea and execution grows longer the more you delay a DX endeavor. At the same time, moving ahead without a clear, experience-based product roadmap can land a digital product or service among the unsuccessful ventures that make up most DX.

By bringing in the veteran experience of EMERGE, company leaders empower their own IT departments and experts to collaborate more effectively, without overburdening staff. From there, a priority-driven product design process keeps customer goals at the forefront of development, enabling new, more powerful avenues toward greater profit.

As CEO Jonathon Hensley explains: “Our approach at EMERGE has always been customer-centric and priority-driven. We align our expertise and process with your customer’s needs and goals, transforming them into powerful results  for your company. Our experience allows us to distill complexity into a focused strategy, bridging the gap between your vision and profitable reality.”

This vision for digital transformation is in line with what Deloitte and McKinsey have highlighted as most impactful in creating success. Building this kind of outcome-driven development process internally is a massive endeavor, prone to error or misinterpretation. By partnering with EMERGE, company leaders avail themselves of a highly-experienced team to work with them at every step of the process, ensuring the path to profit is built into the successful roadmap from day one.