Ronnie Varghese
Technology Product Leader and Management Consultant
Digital transformation these days is not just about adopting new technologies; it's about fundamentally empowering people and reshaping organizational mindsets for sustainable growth and innovation. Successful transformation requires prioritizing human capital and fostering a culture of collaboration and critical thinking. By focusing on people, companies can navigate digital change more effectively and harness technological advancements to drive real value and lasting impact.
This article delves into the transformative insights of Ronnie Varghese, a seasoned Technology Product Leader and Management Consultant, on digital transformation. Varghese emphasizes that true digital transformation goes beyond technology and focuses on empowering people. Through his experiences and methodologies, Varghese illustrates how organizations can shift from feature factories to empowered, outcome-driven teams. Drawing from industry thought leaders like Marty Cagan and Teresa Torres, Varghese provides a roadmap for fostering innovation, improving profitability, and achieving sustainable growth in the modern business landscape.
Digital Transformation is All About People
In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, digital transformation is more than just a buzzword—it's a necessity for survival and growth. Ronnie Varghese, serial Tech Founder, C-Level Technology Leader, and now a Product and Technology Leadership Coach with over two decades of experience, emphasizes that digital transformation transcends mere technology. He says, "The irony in my thoughts on Digital Transformation or what is contrary to what most people think is that digital transformation has very little to do with digital at all. The digital mindset and digital transformation are actually all about people and how to empower and intrinsically motivate people to solve really complex puzzles together. It's about creating a shared mind, where you have different people with different perspectives think critically, and execute together in sync. What makes it a digital transformation is the process of empowering all these different characters to solve those puzzles using technology at scale. I used to be a gamer, and the mental model I have is that of a team Role Playing Game. An RPG where you have a group that's going on a quest, and you have all these different characters - your warrior, your mage, your archer, your cleric, your thief - characters with different skills and powers. Your quest might be to go slay a dragon, and you cannot achieve that quest unless you have all of these different skills and all of these different capabilities. The key to the shared mind is that they all have the same objective and outcome to focus on, but are able to see the problem from various different angles. The digital mindset is about how you get all these different characters with all these different abilities to understand that there's one single quest, and how you get them to understand how their skills contribute to achieving that quest."
This analogy of a role-playing game highlights the need for a diverse set of skills and a unified goal. In a business setting, fostering a digital mindset involves aligning different departments and their unique capabilities toward a common objective. This shared mind is crucial for driving successful digital transformation. According to a 2020 study by Deloitte, organizations that prioritize a people-centric approach to digital transformation are 1.5 times more likely to achieve their objectives than those that focus solely on technology (Deloitte).
From Feature Factories to Empowered Teams
One of the most significant challenges in digital innovation is shifting from being a feature factory to becoming an empowered team. Ronnie explains this transformation, drawing from his extensive experience in the field: "A feature factory is where a cross-functional team, is given a roadmap of features to go and build, and they are accountable for building and deploying those features within a given time constraint. A product manager takes an order from their stakeholders and writes a requirements document, they then hand off that feature request to a designer, the designer does a drawing of it, which then gets handed over to an engineer and the engineer builds it. In that entire process, what's missing is nobody knows why they're doing any of what they're doing. They're given an order by some C-level executive, they take that order, and they go and implement something. And in this model, success is measured by whether something was created and launched within a planned timeline. That's it. And usually what people are measured by is ‘did you do it within a certain timeline’. That’s it. Best case, they are only held accountable for whether they hit their timeline. Worst case, they are still held accountable for the impact that the stakeholders expected and then blamed when no impact was delivered. You said that you're going to do it in a month, did you deliver it in a month? No one measures whether it actually drives any impact.
This was exactly the kind of organization I walked into seven years ago. Smart people just delivered things that didn’t drive much impact. Often, things were also late because there was a laundry list of features, and everything was overcommitted since the measure of success was delivering the most in the least amount of time.
We had to take a step back and completely transform our way of thinking and our way of executing. In our Digital Transformation, we had to change four critical things:
1) How we decided which problems to solve.
2) How we solved those problems.
3) How we built and delivered those solutions, and then measured the impact of solving those problems
4) How we continuously learned and adapted how we did 1-3
(From Marty Cagan’s book Transformed)
First, as a for-profit business, our objective was to create profit. That's simply what a business is. Second, our business is built around solving valuable problems for a customer base in a way that works for them and is unique to our competitors. So the core of Digital Transformation is unifying people in finding valuable and meaningful problems to solve for your customers in a way that generates value for our business.
In the new model, teams are empowered with problems to solve and the resources and capabilities to do so effectively - they are given a significant amount of trust. They are treated like grown-ups with accountability. They are encouraged to spend a lot of time with customers and evaluate available data to find the right problems to solve and to solve them meaningfully for the customer. They are also empowered to build solutions cost-effectively and then measured based on the impact those solutions drive rather than just whether they have been delivered.
Empowered teams understand the 'why' behind their work. They are aligned with the company's broader goals and the customers' needs. According to a 2020 McKinsey report, companies that successfully empower their teams see a 21% increase in profitability compared to their less empowered counterparts (McKinsey & Company). This shift from a task-oriented mindset to an outcome-oriented approach is essential for driving real impact and fostering innovation.