Ronnie Varghese - Embracing the Digital Transformation Journey

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.

Moving from Delivering Features to Measurable Outcomes

Ronnie underscores this point by stating, "This digital mindset driving this digital transformation the process is about how to get all of these different characters with all these different skills and capabilities to focus on a North Star, and then evaluate themselves against moving a measurable needle that represents that North Star. It is about having a compelling and motivating cause that everyone can get behind and also something that can be broken down into being tangible and measurable. It's about moving that measurable outcome versus delivering something. One of the common things that I tell my teams is that I don't care if you've delivered 100 things if you deliver two things, and if you can show me the value that has been generated based on the metrics that we’re trying to move, then you have done a phenomenal job, you've achieved your outcome and I’m deeply proud of you. 

In the initial phase of transformation, I’m less interested in the outcome and I focus on the inputs and activities from the team - are they speaking with customers, are they developing hypotheses, are they validating their assumptions, are they prototyping and testing, are they running experiments, are they communicating their critical thinking process with key stakeholders to get their inputs, are they showing their work and showing their learnings. These input activities will eventually lead to a highly evidence-informed team that is making better and better bets over time. The business results will be a by-product of this collaborative critical thinking work. And what’s even better about this way of working is that people truly enjoy themselves - we have highly motivated and fulfilled people and teams. We drive high retention of smart, good-hearted people because they are growing constantly and they feel good about making a difference. They work in teams and an organization with a high level of intrinsic trust. So hopefully, that gives you a little bit of context on my definition of transformation. Technology just makes all of that more scalable and doing it with tech is what makes it Digital Transformation."

A study by the Gallup organization found that highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability (Gallup, 2020). Moreover, companies with high employee engagement are 22% more profitable and 21% more productive (Gallup, 2020).

Learning from Industry Thought Leaders

Ronnie also draws inspiration from industry thought leaders to drive transformation within organizations. "When I joined this scaling organization and started the transformation journey within this organization, every function was just doing its job. So product managers were collecting and writing requirements, designers were wire-framing and engineers were building and deploying. All to hit a roadmap and a timeline. We were meeting expectations, but we weren’t making any real difference. Morale was low and no real impact was being delivered. I had never scaled anything of that size before, so I turned to thought leaders in the space who had experience transforming teams and building empowered teams. One of my mentors, and someone that I really look up to is a gentleman named Marty Cagan. He is one of the partners at Silicon Valley Product Group and the author of some of the most seminal product books that shape our domain.

He wrote a book called “Inspired” - which covered how to build products customers love that drive business value. It taught me the principles and the mindset required to focus on outcomes (Cagan, 2018). Then he wrote another book called 'Empowered.', which shared the principles of building and scaling teams that could do what was described in “Inspired” (Cagan, 2020).  And then more recently, he wrote a book called 'Transformed' that describes how to transform an organization to adopt these principles at scale (Cagan, 2021). I didn't know how to do this stuff when I started. So I really absorbed his material. And I experimented with the environment that I was given. The product teams had meaningful products to build, but the organization itself was the product I was given to build. I had to transform my ‘product’ from being a feature factory to an empowered, outcome-driven organization. 

I took my leadership team (Product Leads, Design Head, and CTO) to a weekend workshop Marty did in Dubai and they learned firsthand what these principles were and why they matter. Then we engaged Christian Idiodi another partner at SVPG to come run an organization-wide workshop to teach our entire product, design, and tech organization and team leads how to think in this way. Then we worked with Teresa Torres’ book “Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer and Business Value” as a manual that taught us how to implement those principles (Torres, 2021). We engaged Hope Gurion as a continuous discovery coach to our product teams and she also became my product leadership coach. These amazing resources and coaches are the ones who taught us how to apply the product model and continuous discovery principles within our specific context. I believe strongly in learning from people who have lived these models and bring their knowledge and experience to our real-world situations.

We learned to use Teresa’s Opportunity Solution Tree model to set strategic objectives, define outcome metrics, identify customer problems through continuous customer interviews, and how design continuous validation to test our assumptions and risks (Torres, 2021). By applying this shared mindset and these tools and models, the byproduct was a highly aligned organization that focused on fast iteration, continuous learning, and strong execution to deliver measurable results. 

According to a study by Harvard Business Review, organizations that employ continuous discovery practices see a 30% increase in innovation output and a 20% improvement in time-to-market for new products (Harvard Business Review, 2021).

This is what enabled us to transform from a scrappy start-up to a multi-billion dollar business over a span of 5 years. It also allowed us to thrive through COVID-19 come out of the lockdowns stronger than our competitors and achieve 75%+ market share with profitability.

Conclusion

Ronnie Varghese's insights on digital transformation highlight the critical role of people in driving meaningful change within organizations. Emphasizing a people-centric approach, Varghese illustrates how fostering a unified mindset and empowering teams can transform companies from feature factories into outcome-driven innovators. By leveraging methodologies from industry thought leaders like Marty Cagan and Teresa Torres, organizations can achieve significant improvements in innovation, profitability, and market share. Ultimately, successful digital transformation hinges on aligning diverse skills and perspectives towards common objectives, supported by continuous learning and adaptive execution.

Ronnie Varghese spent his early years winning national spelling bees and earning honors as a debate champion. His career has focused on improving lives through coaching, mentorship, and nd building useful technology. He started as a tech/management consultant at Workbrain (Infor), AT Kearney, and Axsium Group, serving clients globally. In 2011, he founded his first startup, Veritasq, followed by co-founding Polyform Labs in 2013, which was acquired by Venture Communications in 2014, where he became Sr. Director of Technology & PMO.

Ronnie served for seven years on the digital product team at Seera/Almosafer/Tajawal. Currently, he is the Founder, Leadership Coach & Advisor (Director to C-level Leaders, Product/Design/Tech Leaders).

Committed to lifelong learning, Ronnie mentors individuals overcoming life challenges. He holds a Comp. Eng. degree from UofT and an MBA from the Rotman School of Management.