90 Day Mindset: A Recipe to Overcome Inertia

Smart business leaders agree that speed-to-market is essential to their survival, and that they need to modernize their products and technology—now. But many come up against Newton’s first law, the law of inertia. They simply don’t know how to get started.

With mounting pressure to exceed operational and customer service levels in parallel, these leaders are worried about the potential risks of modernization, which often involves heavy technical debt. They are equally as concerned about not being able to run current state-of-affairs (devops, service levels, customer satisfaction) satisfactorily during the effort.

Both of these anxieties are related to the belief that modernization means fully tackling a large, looming problem. But the fact is this: digital transformation need not be a big bang roll-out. This is where an Agile mindset—the 90 Day Mindset—is beneficial.

Getting into the 90 day mindset

The 90-day mindset is looking at the digital transformation problem in 90 days chunks, instead of a long-term process. The goal should be to roll out something to market every 90 days. This mindset forces leaders to work backwards and identify the minimal features that can be addressed within 90-day release cycle. A potentially 3-year initiative becomes a 12 releases, 90-day per release continuous cycle.

The way to achieve this mindset is by breaking down the technical debt into smaller components and fragments, and associate market value to them. The market value should take into consideration customer needs and adoption. This helps assign priority levels to the back-log.

The Value of a Quick Win

This initial sprint, when executed with precision and high quality, can do wonders to invigorate the entire business and make the overall exercise a “fun initiative” instead of a laborious project.

It is usually a good idea to tackle the “presentation layer” first. Customer Experience is the most important aspect to adoption. Starting the Modernization project with initial enhancement of the user experience and interface ensures early customer excitement is created, perception of the business as modern, design-led is established, and immediate value is obtained.

Consider Partnerships

Having a development partner who understands the latest CX research, customer journey mapping, design-led innovative thinking, agility and continuous technical delivery can help leaders reduce time-to-market, minimize risk and avoid losing sight of daily operations.

In today’s transformational world, the expectation is to deliver at non-linear output velocities. A 90-day mindset and a partnership with the right development company can bring clarity and focus and allows business to realize value continuously.