Mobile has become the primary way that humans experience a digitally optimized, increasingly connected world. Brands are forced to change at a rapid pace to maintain and create a competitive advantage.
The executive suite is increasingly putting pressure on the business units to make tactical decisions. Siloed mobile efforts across rogue businesses create unmanageable assets, and support issues are unnecessary. User demands are increasing every day, and this forces organizations to take action against corporate directives.
This mobility disruption has caused significant digital friction. The existing models of defining strategy can be time-consuming and complex. They are also based on methods designed to address an audience with stationary targets. Mobile experiences are often driven by moving targets. They are defined by both the message and medium, but also the context.
The complexity of developing strategies and the analysis paralysis that results from this leads to confusion and indecision within organizations. In the age of mobility, brands face the challenge of managing ever-increasing complexity and prioritizing efforts that provide immediate value for the business and add measurable benefits to the user. Most often, the question is: Where to start?
Lean strategy: an alternative to existing strategic thinking
A significant change in the approach is required to develop successful mobility strategies. To achieve success, it is important to quickly identify and prioritize mobility investments in order to foster alignment and continuous innovation.
Clarity is needed for brands to be able to focus on mobile. Stop thinking of large projects and big releases. Instead, adopt a framework for decision-making that is executed in short, informed, and prioritized cycles. Deconstructing complexity is necessary to increase manageability and flexibility and speed up informed decisions.
Prioritizing initiatives intelligently and systematically within and across business lines and departments is a difficult task. Prioritizing initiatives is a complex process. To simplify it, the focus should be on identifying and quickly formulating an informed project activation plan designed to address mobility efforts.
Ideas become opportunities when they are evaluated in terms of their value to the audience, alignment with the business objectives, and the ability of the organization to execute. These ideas then take the form of highly valuable and immediately executable initiatives that have been prioritized.
Agile strategy drives actionable insights and informed planning
This lean framework strategy, when executed well, should be based on three distinct but interrelated steps that provide a road map for achieving more immediate success. These are investigation, formulation, and activation.
- Investigative starts with a thorough understanding of the current market trends and the competition facing the organization. This analysis should then be compared to an audit of the brand’s existing mobile experiences. Understanding user personas, their engagement journey, and key stakeholders within the organization will help form the priority criteria for a prospective effort.
- Formulation includes exploration of current and future mobility initiatives, harnessing market trends and mobile experience audits, and competitive analysis to identify overlooked opportunities. A high-level assessment is also needed to understand the ability of an organization to execute. This includes assessing the level of mobile maturity of the company from the perspective of people, processes, and technology.
- Activation is a combination of all initiatives that pass the litmus tests for alignment with business strategies to be defined. The opportunities must be evaluated from the perspective of the value they bring to the audience, the value they provide to the business, and the ability of the organization to execute them.
Lean activation plans are based on the highest-valued opportunities, which form the basis of lean activation planning. The business case is developed for each initiative, including the cost and resource models required, the technological dependencies, the prospective ROI, and a multi-phase roadmap for continuous solution innovation.
Revised Strategic Models: A Need for Revised Models
The focus on technology can often be detrimental to the goals of an organization. Mobility is all about simplicity. The brand must understand the delicate balance of art and pragmatism.
By adopting lean principles, you can replace complexity, rigidity, and friction with speed, flexibility, and adaptability. The only way to combat the increasing market demand is through an accelerated road map developed by actionable insights and informed plans.
The challenge is to take the lead and drive innovation. Are you ready to lead?
Key Takeaways
- Iteratively identifying mobility investments and prioritizing them is the key to success. This will create alignment and encourage continuous innovation.
- Adopt a lean framework that is executed in short, iterative, prioritized, and informed cycles.
- By adopting lean principles, you can replace complexity, rigidity, and friction with speed, flexibility, and adaptability.