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Agile innovators should continuously experiment with product

By Calton Nhando, digital consultant at IndigoCube.


Johannesburg, 10 Jul 2018
Calton Nhando, digital consultant at IndigoCube.
Calton Nhando, digital consultant at IndigoCube.

You must continuously conduct product experiments for your markets if you want to be an agile innovator. It's the only way to respond, adapt, innovate and deliver what your markets demand, helping you deal with competition and the market disruption of the digital age. Business agility is the outcome of an operating model that meets the needs of a rapidly changing and complex world, says Calton Nhando, digital consultant at IndigoCube.

But, most businesses can't do this properly yet, and their old ways of working don't cut the mustard anymore. The old ways of developing products and bringing them to market mean you run the very likely risk that you create, at great expense of time, money and human resources, products and features that nobody wants. It is a colossal waste that is unsustainable in the digital era, where agile competitors and the unknowns that are entrepreneurial market disruptors surround you.

The old methodology is heavily based on assumptions and substantially less on the facts about what markets need and customers want. Executives or committees that may or may not have the requisite experience, knowledge and expertise make decisions. It's a dicey world. Too dicey for modern appetites for risk and the necessity for returns.

That's because employees would make a bunch of assumptions, perhaps add a dash of market research based on samples, then expend a lot of effort creating a full product from one end to the other, then release that completed product. If the market accepted it then everyone was happy. If not it was back to the drawing board and write off the expense as school fees.

But, with digitalisation, companies now have the opportunity to be agile. Those that embrace the opportunity will get a competitive edge so massive the rest will cease to be relevant, and will ultimately fold.

In the digital era, and particularly in the realm of software development, you can hypothesise a product, build the smallest, quickest, easiest version possible, and release it to market or a subset of the full audience. You get immediate feedback, from day one, on acceptance, usability, functionality, processes, and much, much more. It's a byproduct of the digital paradigm that naturally generates a ton of metrics and other data.

Adopting the continuous experimentation model means you save yourself months of work and very quickly build the fastest failure so you can discover what works. When you get the fast fails out of the way, you open the path to real innovation by experimentation that gives you the most surefire feedback to create what people want and ditch what they don't.

But, to continuously experiment, you have to have the right platforms in place. You cannot decide to embrace continuous product experimentation and think your waterfall model will support it. By the same token, your operations people and business executives have to be in tune with the model. Operations people are notorious for desiring constancy. They want customers and clients to always get the same, comfortable product from you that they've always had. It's safe because people have always bought it. So you have to impress on them the need to be able to change that up a bit. Constancy is desirable, it's the foundation of franchises so popular in our modern societies, but it has to accommodate innovation to remain relevant in an agile, digital world.

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IndigoCube

IndigoCube taps into its in-depth experience and expertise in software delivery to empower enterprises in the fast-moving digital age to build, secure and run software more efficiently using a consolidated approach combining skills development, process transformation and the implementation of leading-edge automation technology. IndigoCube focuses particularly in the areas of lean agile transformation, DevOps optimisation, lean product management, rapid application development, cyber security, customer experience, automation, API management and micro-services to boost productivity and long-term return on investment.

Editorial contacts

Michelle Oelschig
Scarlet Letter
(083) 636 1766
michelle@scarletletter.co.za