Why changing your culture can transform how you deliver digital products

These digital solutions include an array of online and technology-driven solutions, including websites, mobile and web applications, internal business systems, e-commerce platforms, data platforms, and AI solutions. There are also specific requirements in industries like Asset and Wealth Management, where Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) are needed, which combine client-facing applications with emerging technologies, such as GenAI. 

No matter what shape these solutions come in, there’s never been a more important time to build the right digital products and to build them in the right ways. 

However, I’ve seen several challenges that can impede the success of these initiatives. These challenges include traditional funding models for digital products, complexities in integrating new solutions with existing technology, the absence of a strategic vision, and the risk of technical debt due to deprioritisation of previous technology investments.

But, the biggest challenge in my experience is transforming the behaviours, practices, and principles and the way people work together - all of which make up the organisational culture. 

What are the key cultural challenges?

The main cultural barriers that I repeatedly come across are:

• Risk aversion and resistance to change: this is a natural response to any risk around a new digital product and any new way of working. This slows down transformation efforts and limits the value you get from building new digital products and ways of working, meaning the business impact delivered at the end is also constrained. 
• Siloed teams and thinking: these are common symptoms of organisations that have gradually grown over time into a complex environment of teams, departments and functions. All of which have their own objectives and areas of responsibility. This results in teams building inconsistent digital products, making siloed, disjointed decisions, and potentially choosing different technologies, tools and approaches within the same organisation. Lead time for getting products delivered increases, and the customer experience suffers.  
• Over-reliance on existing/legacy technologies: often technology choices become ingrained in the technical ecosystem of an organisation. This becomes more cemented over time, as other technologies and products are integrated and built on top of the legacy technology, due to ongoing prioritisation of new features and functionality. Scalability is limited, integrations are blocked and security is compromised. All of these factors increase the technical debt and costs for supporting, maintaining and migrating the technologies in the future. 
  
  

So, how can we solve these challenges?

Risk aversion and resistance to change

The appetite for risk in an organisation is influenced by many factors, such as their brand, the industry they’re in, their SLAs and customer expectations, and their record of previous security issues. This also impacts how ready people are for change and transformation.

The first step is to create small, quick, and visible wins by building products that help demonstrate gradual progress. This could be iteratively delivering small features to a digital product and/or making small adjustments to the delivery approach. Such an approach keeps the changes transparent and builds trust/buy-in to the change. Additionally, taking steps to understand people’s concerns provides insights for leadership to alleviate and align the changes with people’s motivations.

Building an environment that allows for experiments without risking compliance, security, or customer trust enables teams to take small risks with what they’re building and how they’re building it. Clear success criteria should be defined to build confidence in data-driven innovation and decisions up and down the organisational chain, creating more trust when taking validated risks and breaking down resistance. 

Siloed teams and thinking

I’ve seen many organisations come across the same challenge of teams working in isolation due to the organisational structure naturally becoming larger, more complex, with distinct boundaries over time. A key mitigation to this is to pilot cross-functional teams at the team level and the leadership level, enabling individuals at both levels to collaborate. This can be done by informally ringfencing the required (team and leadership) roles for delivering a digital product across the organisation. 

These teams and forums will be conducive to sharing ideas and challenges across domains. Bringing cross-functional leaders together is also a key step towards having shared goals and success metrics across capabilities, further increasing the need for collaboration and collective ownership. This ensures that the end digital product is validated, functional and integrated.

Over-reliance on legacy tech

Unravelling years of built-up technical debt is no mean feat. Many organisations are already experiencing this issue. In this case, it’s crucial to make the tech debt visible by including it in regular planning sessions and backlog refinement instead of trying to fix it under the radar. 

This often happens when the Product Owner is not clear on the impact of the tech debt. Aligning the tech strategy with the product roadmap makes it easier to see the impact of not paying off the tech debt. Organisations can achieve this through collaborative planning, estimating and prioritisation, resulting in a feasible and pragmatic shared roadmap. Teams should be rewarded and celebrated not just for delivering features, but also for reducing complexity and improving long-term agility/adaptability.
 
I’ve guided organisations through these cultural barriers by using Crosstide’s 4 stage approach:

• Understand: Assessing current working practices and challenges so that cultural barriers to progress can be identified and solutions designed with them in mind.
• Prove: Starting with pilot implementations that demonstrate the value of new solutions to customers and employees and the benefits to the wider business.
• Scale: Once the pilot has proved successful and has overcome some of the key cultural barriers, rolling out of the new digital solutions and ways of working across more teams and business areas. At this stage, measurement against established metrics charting progress and keeping implementations on track is key.
• Optimise: Refining ways of working and insights continuously, based on user feedback, to drive ongoing improvement to both the products and organisational culture.
  
  

These small steps will help your organisation deliver better and faster, which is a win for your customers as well as your product and technology teams. 

If you have any questions or thoughts on navigating cultural barriers when building and delivering modern, digital products, please get in touch.