Your composable DXP's success depends on your digital strategy

A digital strategy describes the future state of your platform and lays out the plan for how you will get from where you are now to that future state.

A strategy is a living document because change, most of which you have no control over, is inevitable. Business environments change, customer habits change, governments change, pandemics happen. Your strategy has to adapt to those changes.

The strategy, and the process to create it, need to be lean, agile and resilient.

Digital strategies are pointless if they are not actioned. You want your strategy to easily understood so it needs to be just big enough. A document the size of War and Peace might look impressive, but it'll be nothing more than a digital dust collector.

Following these 5 simple steps will help you avoid producing a Tolstoy epic.

1. Define the experience

To build a digital experience platform you need to know what experience you're trying to deliver. Find this out by creating evidence-based journey maps for each service your customers are completing.

Qualitative research is critical. The only way to find out how a customer feels during the journey is to ask them. Points in the journey where a customer feels negative or neutral emotions are your opportunities. The bonus is that your customers will often suggest improvements.

2. Identify features

You've identified your services and completed your journey maps. The next step is to work out the features your services need to enable you to take advantage of the improvement opportunities identified in your journey maps. You'll likely want to go more granular with your features. For example, you might need:

• a shopping cart that emails receipts

• a payment gateway that handles Apple Pay

• access to real-time delivery costs and timeframes for a specific delivery service.

Your future state is the features you need to support the services and exploit the opportunities.

3. Analyse current-future gaps

With your future state defined, you determine which features you can fully or partially support with your current products and tools.

Where a feature is partially supported you'll need to decide whether to replace or enhance the relevant product. For example, you might have a shopping cart but it doesn't email receipts.

Ensure all new products or services are MACH-certified and comply with the MACH principles. Remember, you're building a composable platform where you can swap components with minimal disruption.​

4. Develop a plan to plug those gaps

Now you've identified the gaps, you can develop your plan for transitioning to your future state. ​

Your budget, resources and your organisation's business strategy will constrain your plan. And because change is inevitable, we strongly recommend an iterative approach.​ Do this by prioritising the journeys and their features.

The first iteration creates your MVP (minimum viable platform): the essential services and their mandatory features.​ Subsequent iterations will build out the platform to add more features and handle more services.

Set yourself 90-day, 1-year and 2-year goals for short-term wins and clear insight into where you are heading. ​

5. Review, update, rinse and repeat

Remember, a digital strategy is a living document.

You'll need to review it every quarter to update your 90-day goals. Chances are you'll find yourself regularly updating your 1-year goals and even your 3-year goals to accommodate external changes.

This is why a composable DXP is so important.​ The ability to respond to change by quickly updating, replacing or adding a component builds resilience into your strategy and DXP.

Contact us for a free consultation today.