Enterprise leaders: it’s time for Startup 101

“I wish this place could be more like a startup!”

This quote was from an enterprise digital executive challenging his leadership team. Underneath that statement, I’m wondering if he meant, “how can we take more risks, get closer to our customers and move faster like a startup?”

A few months ago, Quantum Metric launched a new initiative to teach enterprise leaders about Continuous Product Design (CPD), an approach to building digital products with greater speed and confidence, while aligning teams around the customer. Let’s call it “Startup 101.”

Since the launch, we’ve had tremendous response from digital leaders around the world telling us that Continuous Product Design is changing their cultures and the way their companies operate. Read on, if you’d like to learn more.

What is Continuous Product Design?

Traditional large enterprises weren’t built to move fast and disrupt like big tech. So there’s a fundamental question they’re asking themselves: “How can we move faster while also building products with confidence and with customers in mind.”

To address the issue of speed, many companies turned to agile years ago. Agile revolutionized the software industry and became mainstream in product development by helping teams deliver code more quickly and iteratively.

But the second part about “confidence” has been a bigger challenge. Although releases got faster, they weren’t always better. How often are these products truly solving customer problems? Failing fast was a popular motto a few years back. But it’s wasteful and inefficient if you’re just moving fast without learning fast.

Anyone who’s practiced agile understands user stories and backlog prioritization demand a fair amount of guesswork. That’s because it was designed to move fast, rather than empathize with customers. With delivery-driven methodologies like Agile and Devops, it’s easy to release code hundreds of times a day without knowing how customers react. 

But what if we could release at the same velocity with confidence that customers will love it? What if teams aligned around a single version of truth about the customer? What if insights were democratized, instead of hoarded? And what if we could empathize with customers in real time?

That’s Continuous Product Design.

Continuous Product Design is a cross-team approach to building better digital products faster — based on a shared, quantified, and continuous view of customer signals.

What is CPD Foundations?

CPD Foundations is a free one hour digital leadership certification in Continuous Product Design. It’s geared for busy enterprise digital leaders across the C-Suite, UX, Product, CX, Analytics, Engineering and Ops. If you’re focused on building better digital experiences for consumers, CPD Foundations is for you.

With this course, you’ll learn how to:

• Instill confidence in your digital operation with a quantified approach to business prioritization
• Reduce time to identify opportunities and resolve critical issues
• Optimize products and iterate faster to achieve greater value and adoption
• Do more with less by boosting revenues and reducing costs

So why get CPD certified?

To start, CPD Foundations will teach you the eight practices of CPD, an easy step by step guide to success in your digital organization. These are the eight practices used by the true leaders in digital, including Amazon and Netflix.

You’ll also learn why many companies don’t reach their potential. CPD Foundations highlights the ten organizational barriers to achieving cross-team alignment, speed and customer-obsession. Hint: many of these barriers boil down to cultural barriers, many of which can be overcome. 

Still not sure whether to invest the hour to get certified? Then take 5 minutes and assess the speed of your digital organization with our brief CPD Maturity Assessment. You might discover you have further to go on your CPD journey than you thought.

It’s time to learn faster and dream like a startup

Companies are missing out on millions of dollars in opportunity because they’re not building experiences customers love. They’re investing in multiple tools and operating in data silos that result in waste, inefficiency and misalignment across teams. All of this results in poor customer experience, lost revenue and declining loyalty. 

To make matters worse, the past year has been challenging enough for so many companies, where everyday in digital retail is like Black Friday and they’re trying to address customer struggle at scale. eCommerce took a disproportionate share of total retail revenue in 2020 due to the pandemic.

That’s why is such an exciting time for companies to reimagine their digital organizations, and refocus on becoming faster, more lean and innovative – like the startup you always dreamed of.

It’s time to stop dreaming and start doing. Begin your CPD journey today. Take the brief 2 minute CPD maturity assessment and get certified in CPD Foundations and share your newfound credentials on LinkedIn!