Making Technology A Part Of Your Company’s Story

We’ve previously explored ways to unpack the company’s mission statement and ensuring that our technology organization is aligned with what’s important to our company. Now we need to find ways to get the teams within our organization on board, so that we can transform the business’ perception of the company from “necessary evil” to “massive competitive advantage.”

Getting good at this will mean our team members develop commercial thinking skills, where they begin to think about how their solutions will be used, and the impact they will have on the business. This way of thinking erases the boundaries between them and the business as the team works to ensure that they are delivering something that provides value to their customers, as opposed to simply meeting the requirements they are given. When this happens, we will begin to unlock our true potential as a game changer for the business.

Let’s look at the example mission statement again, and ask some questions about it. We want to think about the power our team has to contribute to the mission.

“We make attractive, affordable, durable, slip-free area rugs and deliver them to customers’ homes within 3 days.”

Attractive

• How might we better enable the customer to view the rugs?

• What are some innovative ways to show the rugs to the users (such as virtual showrooms, room designer apps, or similar)?

• How can we provide multiple channels for viewing and purchasing (web, mobile, etc)?

• What are the UI/UX design decisions we could make that will increase the likelihood of customers making a purchase?
  

Affordable

• What info can we give the business about its manufacturing and shipping costs?

• How can we provide optimization capabilities for the manufacturing process?

• What market intelligence could we provide to enable better pricing vs. competitors?

• How can we provide ways to engage in what-if scenarios around margin vs volume?

• How might we offer a way to optimize the sourcing costs for raw materials?

• Are there other ways we can help them lower prices while maintaining the desired margin on products?
  

Durable

• What are the ways to track the quality of materials we get from source vendors?

• How can we provide a way to track quality in the manufacturing process?

• How could we track the customer experience with our rugs so that we know they are long-lasting?
  

Slip-free

• How can we track incidents of safety with our customers (via reviews, other ways of gathering feedback)?
  

Deliver… within 3 days

• How can we help ensure the right rug is in inventory and ready to ship when the customer orders it?

• How can we track the progress of the rug on its way to the customer?

• What are some ways for us to ensure that delivery costs are kept low without sacrificing the SLA?

• If we miss the SLA, what does that mean? Does the customer get a refund? A discount? Something else? Can we fully automate this process so the customer doesn’t even have to tell us about it before they receive compensation?

• How can we offer a quick and easy way for a customer to raise an issue about delivery and have their concerns resolved?
  

For each of the questions above, there are many ways we could partner with the business to answer them. Doing this will take us from “IT allows the customer to order rugs” to “IT brings us thought leadership and capabilities we hadn’t considered that help us achieve our mission.”

With this shift, we go from being a minor character in the company’s story to one of the key protagonists. Once the business sees the technology organization as a partner in their endeavor, they will begin to value us more. And the more we help them advance their goals, the more they will invest in the relationship.

If this is to work, though, we cannot be the only ones with this vision. Our teams need to share it, and live it day to day. They are all part of the story.

[Next: Getting The Team Into The Narrative]