Corporate CPR Episode 53: How to Align Digital Strategies for Success

On today's show, we discuss strategies for aligning digital strategies to avoid corporate failure.Jonathon Hensley is co-founder and CEO of Emerge, a digital product consulting firm that works with companies to improve operational agility and customer experience. For more than two decades, Jonathon has helped startups, Fortune 100 brands, technology leaders, large regional health networks, non-profit organizations and more, transform their businesses by turning strategy, user needs and new technologies into valuable digital products and services. Jonathon writes and speaks about his experiences and insights from his career, and regularly hosts in-depth interviews with business leaders and industry insiders. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two boys. What are the foundational components of a digital strategy?What is the vision for the product? What is the long-term destination? What is the problem that you are solving with the product?How can I create value by solving the problem in a better way in this market?What will be the outcome for that success for the customer and the business? How will we measure that forward progress?How can a company be sure they have evaluated the strategy well before moving forward?Is the problem you have defined a root cause or a symptomatic issue of a different problem?Who is the audience most impacted?Is the problem big enough that they are willing to invest dollars and time to solve it?Do you have empathy for your customer enough to really understand the ramifications of their problem and what value you can bring? How does a company determine their focus?A company needs to decide and agree what attributes of the market they can do well and focus on those things. They should choose things that are underrepresented, not try to do everything that the competitors are doing. What are the key attributes of companies that succeed?Developing a clear, well-defined, and long-term product vision.Building teams where everyone understands that they have a stake in customer acquisition, participation, retention, and support.Equating customer experience to customer life-time value. It's an umbrella to everything.Being clear on value drivers - psychological value and functional value.Defining the key attributes to focus on.Knowing the customer motivations. Top 3 Takeaways:Develop understanding of strategy vs planning.  The skillset is different for strategic work. Strategy is understanding the problem space so we can understand where we can focus and make the biggest impact with our capabilities and resources. Planning is determining how we can effectively manage those resources and bring alignment to our team so we can execute on the strategy.Make sure that there is a common language within the organization to build a culture. Set up the team members for success.Manage knowledge so that you are able to scale and train each role in their processes and the value they bring. Connect with Jonathon Hensley:Company: https://www.emergeinteractive.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathonhensley/Book: Overcoming internal sabotage and digital product failure