Using the digital product approach to gain business efficiencies

Key points:

• Data first. Always.
• Review your processes but don’t leap to conclusions
• Build your team up and work together

It can be challenging to do the best for your business at the best of times. It is even more challenging whilst we are all occupied thinking about and dealing with the effects of a Pandemic. When you have the responsibility of managing a team your focus needs to be on them and avoid falling into the common trap of taking it all on yourself. Digital product management can help. And a good digital product agency can get you started and keep you on track for success.

A good digital product manager knows that driving more out of the team is more effective than trying to do it all yourself. They know the common pitfalls and how best to avoid them. How to follow their nose and listen to the data. They seek to improve the overall system to make it more efficient and effective.

Numbers don’t lie, so rely on data and proof

If you are not managing your team with the right metrics you are flying blind. Even just focusing too heavily on lagging indicators, like cost alone, can set you up for disaster. The key is to look at what happened in the past. Break it down. Measure it carefully. Time each step. Understand how often things happen. What drives them to happen. Is a process done when there is a sale? Or is it done when a customer returns? Is it every time or once in every 10 sales or 100 sales?

These kinds of metrics will let you build up your model to better understand your business. Knowing which processes are least efficient tells you where to look for improvement. Running these models against potential future scenarios – like your budget or what if scenarios for future growth – will let you know how your business can scale. This lets you deal with issues or cope with growth like a champion.

There is always more than one way to skin a cat

OK, so now you know what is happening in your business. You know which teams are at capacity and which ones will reach it soon. You know which processes are most expensive and which ones aren’t worth spending the effort to review. I have talked about this before here and here.

All of this information is great but what to do with it? Well, it depends…

People talk about automation like it is a panacea. Trust me, it is not. Automation can introduce complexity that when an issue arises end up making things less efficient than they were when it was all manual. Automating a process also costs money, whether it is executed through software or hardware. It is key for a good digital product manager to think along these lines.

Eliminate

The first thing to do when assessing how to make a process more efficient is to see whether or not it can be eliminated. Yes, that’s right, not doing anything is always more efficient than doing something. If you are lucky enough to find whole processes that can be eliminated then do so, it is gold for your bottom line. An example of this might be a report that is generated in your business but those who receive it don’t really need it. Often these reports are done and are used for a while, and sadly they often manually produced as they require data collection or just not been automated. They may have been important once, but now they just get filed in the circular file so to speak.

Simplify

The next thing to do is review your processes for steps that can be eliminated to simplify the process. This is much the same as the previous but is just a sub group. Does it really require this extra review? It may seem inefficient but be careful as it can be for important management control/compliance or regulatory reasons so undertake this carefully.

Re-engineer

Related to this is redesigning your processes. There are a number of techniques that you can use here which I wont go into in this article but one important principal is to focus your efforts on the constraints (or bottlenecks). If you put energy into the other areas of your process but ignore the constraint then you can’t actually improve the process overall.

Automate

Now that you have eliminated, reduced or improved your process (or hopefully a combination of the above across the board) you can start to make the case for automation. Just do so with a view to a business case. If it will cost more to automate than to run manually (including accounting for the risks of manual processes) then it isn’t worth the effort.

We are legion. We digital product…

The last and I think most important thing to remember here is about your team. When the team is busy and we are under pressure, it is easy to fall into the trap of taking more on To ease the burden on the team. To dive in and get your hands dirty. This can be really important under the right circumstances but it is a trap that you can get stuck in. If you don’t spend time to improve the operation as a whole then you can’t properly see where you are inefficient.

If you have 10 people reporting to you, an extra 10% from each is worth a whole extra team member. No matter how hard you work to muck in with the team you aren’t going to be delivering an extra 100% and still functioning as an effective leader.

One way to get more out of the team is to reduce the effort through the things we talked about above. The other way is to help the team improve.

Improve the individuals

This can be done by delivering training to educate the team on the processes and supporting skills. If people are better at what they do then they can do more faster and with reduced risk. They also will feel better as they are being invested in which is something that they can take forward throughout their entire career.

Improve the cohesion

Improving the output is also achieved through improved communication. If everyone knows what is going on and is clear about how their activity effects the business, the customers and each other then they will be more engaged. Helping the team to feel better and care more about the business and each other. I’ll talk more about these and some ways to improve this in a future article.

The bottom line here is that to get more out of your business for less you need to invest in data, you need to spend time on analysis and review, and you need to engage with your team and build rapport.

This is more important now whilst we all deal with COVID-19, everyone is stressed and worried and businesses need every efficiency they can get. If you need help getting started, the product agency can help.

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