Why is Time to Market so important in Digital Transformation?
We live in a very fast 24/7 economy. So, the customers I worked with always face competition and always face new innovations or movements which they need to address to stay relevant. If you are not relevant as a company anymore, meaning people do not purchase your products or services anymore, you are out of business in the long run. Therefore, a quick Time-to-Market between concept and roll-out is necessary to be successful in your Digital Transformation.
Which Time-to-Market method or approach has proved to work well?
The most successful companies work with product owners and agile teams whereby the focus is first delivering an API, so internal and external teams can work independent of each other. And secondly, they work on the internal mapping towards the back-end systems. Important though is that you organize the rules-of-engagement upfront. It’s very important that your software development teams work in parallel. So with an API-first approach your external facing team can work in parallel with the internal facing team at the same time. And by that you reduce the Time to Market for your solution or your service.
What are the rules-of-engagement in this context?
To deliver fast, so in a quick Time-to-Market approach, it is crucial that everybody works in the same manner, with the same standards. It’s very important that you have the rules of engagement in place. So, start with creating a cookbook with the standards for API’s, Services, Documentation, Testing and so on. And with such cookbook you set the rules: how to develop an API, how to document, how to test, how to employ such an API and the underlaying back-end service. And when everybody applies that cookbook, you can work with teams in parallel because you know how it all comes together in the end.
Where is the difference with regular projects and the Digital Transformation in this respect?
With regular projects, more internally focused you can effort yourself to spend some time to align with all stakeholders and teams. With the Digital Transformation whereby Time-to-Market is critical not to miss out the market opportunity, you simple cannot afford to lose time. So, my tip form lessons learned: Have a cookbook in place.
