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Digital Transformation is quite a vast term that doesn’t have a clear description, and its goals vary from company to company. A common trait, however, is optimizing a company’s business processes with the help of modern technology and practices. 

To begin with, we need to question why a business would need this in the first place. The answer is simple, to stay afloat. Every company aspires to spend less, earn more and rapidly adapt to the industry’s changing landscape to surpass the competition. In addition, the current level of technological development allows any process in the company to be optimized, making it faster and more precise, sometimes even completely removing the human factor from it, while modern managerial practices allow a certain level of flexibility for prompt reactions to market changes.

But where should you start? How do you guarantee you plan and distribute the resources and budgets correctly so your business can make the most out of its Digital Transformation? After all, unless you are Amazon or Walmart, you really won’t be able to fully digitalize all of the company’s processes.

In my opinion, the best way to approach this is the Product Approach, a company’s work organization method that predominantly focuses on developing products to satisfy the maximum of customers’ requirements. Teams implementing this approach have business KPIs and base their decisions on measurable customer satisfaction metrics. The product, in this approach, is seen as a set of results that the customer expects to receive, as well as the actual process of achieving them. A product can be both an online shop or company website, or a CRM system or delivery service, while a customer can both be external (a shopper) or internal (warehouse employee).

Let’s look at the stages of this approach’s implementation:

Stage 1 – Task Setting: Like any other task, Digital Transformation requires us to establish the problem, set the right tasks, and assess the capabilities before we proceed. For example, your goal might be to improve customer service quality by organizing delivery in narrow timeslots or increasing your website’s conversions. The main thing to remember is that a goal must always have a measurable criterion of achievement: NPS, number of orders, cart abandonment rate, etc. At the end of this stage, a Product Owner needs to be assigned, who can be chosen internally or hired externally.


Stage 2 – Planning: After the goals are set, it is time to decide what kind of product will be created as part of the Digital Transformation. This doesn’t always imply an actual development process and often requires several pinpointed changes using existing tools or integrating modern market solutions. The journey towards the goal needs to be set in the form of a Roadmap, during the formation of which the Product Owner needs always to answer the following questions:

  • What are the customers needs?
  • What solutions or practices are available today to satisfy these needs?
  • What value will the developed product bring?
  • Does it have development potential?
  • How much will it cost?

In an ideal world, the roadmap needs to reflect the whole journey of Digital Transformation until the goal is achieved, yet in reality, it rarely remains unchanged during the entire cycle. This is why a massive advantage of the Product Approach is that it allows a certain flexibility due to its iteration process of realization. It will enable you to move towards your goal iteration by iteration, starting with an MVP of the solution to test your hypothesis and asses the results, allowing you to correct the roadmap to remain on the right path. After all, it is better to spend a couple of weeks building an MVP to establish that a wrong direction was chosen rather than spend a year developing the complete solution only to realize that it has failed and everything was in vain.


Stage 3 – Realization: The next step is bringing the roadmap to life. To do that, you need to create a specific environment: 

First and foremost, you need to build a team around the product owner who will solve the tasks. The team needs to be independent, consist of all the required specialists, and focus on reaching the digital transformation targets.

The team needs to proceed via iterations, and ideally, after every iteration that ends with implementation or testing, metrics established during the planning stage need to be analyzed.

The product owner must have the power to manage the team, the project’s budget, and the top management’s support and trust. The top managers must be confident that the set goals will be reached, and it is the product owners’ job to maintain this confidence by constantly demonstrating the delivered results.


Stage 4 – Analyzing results: The end of all works and delivery of all the results written in the roadmap usually do not signify the end of the Digital Transformation. Many of my colleagues and I believe that true digital transformation is a never-ending process because the market and competition constantly evolve.

Nevertheless, completing the roadmap is an essential mark in that journey. The moment when you can look back, carefully dissect the results delivered and retrospectively analyze everything with the top management and teams. Here are some key global metrics that you need to base your analysis on:  

  • Time and money invested in the creation of an MVP and product launch
  • Number of clients that have been working with the product
  • Funds growth due to the launch of the product
  • The digital transformation’s ROI

No company can constantly ride the wave of success in our fast-paced reality. We can see proof of that in the number of businesses that fell victim to the pandemic and the changing geopolitical situation. But, on the other hand, change always brings new opportunities, and the Product approach, with its flexibility, is a great solution to maintain the life cycle of a business and leverage them.

In regards to digital transformation, I believe that once begun, it needs to become a constant ongoing process that walks hand in hand with the company’s growth and evolution.

To find out more about Unlimint and the services they provide to the retail industry, click here.

This article was also published in The Retailer, our quarterly online magazine providing thought-leading insights from BRC experts and Associate Members.