We live in a continuous customer economy. Buyers in the 21st century are continuously discovering, adopting and discarding products and services online, telling us—very loudly and unequivocally—that value isn’t perceived in the actual product itself, but rather in our ability to change a product continuously. So, it’s now about the options to change the product, not the product options themselves.
This utter lack and loss of brand loyalty puts companies at an insane disadvantage. They’re living with a “see you later” digital mindset, where it’s easy for consumers to say goodbye to something they know online for an opportunity with the newest, next best thing.
Take this to the next logical business level and you see why continuous transformation of your organization is so critical. If you can’t continuously transform the way you deploy your people, processes, skills and resources, so everything is aligned with the consumer’s “see you later” mindset, there’s no way you can keep up with customers, who are continuously discovering, adopting and discarding products at what seems like warp speed.
Obviously, this means learning and acquiring new knowledge fast.
The same old knowledge, the knowledge of the past, just doesn’t work in the world of now. But, more profoundly, to continuously transform your organization and meet customers where they are today, you need to learn how to learn.
Yes, sure, you have to learn from customers and gain an understanding of what they want and need. But every organization does that today. It’s no longer enough to simply grasp that insight and intelligence and run with it. No, you have to continuously improve how you learn from customers in this fluid and fast-changing world.
Why? Because, at the end of the day, continuously improving how you learn is the only way to continuously transform your organization. And, thus, continuously improving how you learn is the only competitive advantage you have.
Continuously Improving What—and How—You Ship
Assume, for a moment, that you’re shipping an update of 1,000 lines of software code each week.
That’s great.
You’re likely using continuous delivery.
But if you can’t continuously improve how you’re learning from customers and continuously improve the teams inside your organization, you can’t ship continuously improved products. So, you need to improve what you ship and how you ship to continuously transform your organization.
Here’s an example of how this works.
Let’s say your software development team senses the customer wants an improved red button that’s square instead of round. Okay, development of an improved red button proceeds and is completed in one week. But, at the same time, the team creates an automated test for the red button as well as clear metrics for determining if the red button is actually the problem. Remember, the idea that the button needed changing is a hypothesis until it has been tested with customers.
So, in addition to shipping the new square button to some customers, the team keeps some subset of customers using the round button. The customer test is then simply whether the click rate of the square and round button differs.
Let’s imagine that the processes are not currently in place to enable the development team to receive these metrics, as many teams are kept in splendid isolation from the results of their work. Then the establishment of this relationship, perhaps with the web operations team, is also going to be required.
This is as much a requirement of successful deployment of these features as the features themselves. The focus on the delivery of function, as well as developing internal capability, is a core principle of continuous transformation.
The Two-Product Principle
This is the Two-Product Principle.
Think of the product we ship to the customer as “Product 1.”
Meanwhile, the internal capabilities we wish to develop—our view of what we need to improve while we build—is “Product 2.”
To recap two critical points:
- You always ship twice—you ship an improved product externally and you ship improved capabilities internally.
- All of our product decisions, what to build and what to deliver, are theory until the customer actually uses the deployed product and we learn from that interaction.
If you take these two critical points to heart, then your organization will do all it can to shorten the time to deployment and action to shorten the time to gain new learning in the market. This limits the length of the costly business guessing game, the cash-draining theory time.
Continuously Learning at High Velocity
The way you can do this is by continuously shipping, continuously delivering, continuously learning how to improve how you learn and deliver—continuously improving your internal capabilities and continuously transforming.
Unfortunately, many organizations that want to increase velocity go faster without improving their ability to learn at this new speed.
The implications of this short-sightedness are profound: When you’re leaning and looking backwards, you’re not improving how you learn from your customers in real time and, instead, you’re adding to your risk going forward because you’re so out of step, and out of touch, with what the market wants and needs.
Every Act of Design is an Act of Feedback
Too many companies fail to obtain crucial feedback. They throw a ball up in the air and walk away before it actually lands. We see this in software development when an organization releases a new quarterly product or feature and returns four months later; sadly, this approach doesn’t allow for much effectiveness tracking, or much learning, or much improvement.
Which is why every single action in the continuous transformation process needs to be an act of design. The act of design is an act of feedback. And, in continuous transformation, you’re continuously getting feedback—whether you’re shipping product externally to a customer or you’re making changes inside your organization.
The bottom line is that you need to continuously test your assumptions about the world, as well as your effectiveness in responding to those assumptions, if you want to keep up with continuously changing customers in the continuous economy of the 21st century.