Every successful digital transformation has three things in common, regardless of your industry, goals, and product. We’ve seen consistently that these three strategies are more likely than anything else to lead to a successful end result.
1. Make customer-centered and data-driven decisions
Expertise in user research, UX measurement, and customer feedback loops moves discussions about the evolution of your product from internal debates to clear, data-driven decisions. Initial discovery research, ongoing evaluative testing and feedback research, and planning for continual improvement creates space for rich customer experience data. The information generated here will help to prioritize your efforts at all steps: where to start, what to refine before launch, and what to prioritize after launch.
2. Use an agile approach with phased updates
Large overhauls can be daunting and time consuming. Breaking work into consumable segments allows you to get updates to the market faster and validate assumptions with users. This can mean that an end-to-end modernization effort that would have taken two years to complete can be broken down and released over time, with valuable updates happening every few weeks.
An iterative approach also allows you to focus and prioritize your efforts, ensuring that time spent drives actual value. And the consequences of not taking a phased approach are big: a two-year build will most likely be out of date before it even hits the market.
3. Implement a design system and a DesignOps practice
As products and teams grow, so does internal complexity. The more people who join a team, the harder it is to stay aligned. When people are overloaded with work, communication drops. And it’s often more tempting for groups to solve challenges independently rather than work proactively across teams. The fundamentals of better design operations will help solve these issues.
A design system helps projects scale by absorbing complexity and providing teams with the foundational guidance and tooling needed day-to-day to design and build the product.
A focus on the fundamentals of DesignOps enables better design leadership to help evolve your team, tools, and processes so you can produce better work.
Without this foundation, confusion and chaos run rampant, which quickly bleeds into the customer experience.