Product thinking promises to allow organisations to prioritise activity more effectively, as they can connect investment with return. It returns value more quickly, reduces waste, encourages a consumer-centric approach and connects teams and individuals with a collective sense of purpose.
Like agile and lean thinking, product thinking comes from the world of software development. Its three pillars are:
- Doing the right thing: employing human-centred design; focusing on outcomes for the business, rather than deliverables from a process.
- Doing the thing right: building for continual change; delivering value early and building it continually.
- Doing it effectively: working in multi-disciplinary teams across the organisation; treating agencies and partners as an extension of the business.
The Driving Digital Effectiveness with Product Thinking report, based on a survey of over 400 client-side marketers, agencies, consultants and vendors, looks at how advanced companies are in their digital transformation, and assesses how widely the ideas of product thinking have been adopted.
It explores these topics by looking at the views of brands and agencies, and by comparing the views of the top-performing businesses with those of their mainstream counterparts.
The report, published in partnership with Code Computerlove, is divided into four parts:
- In the first part, we look at the level of digital maturity among client-side businesses; how developed their use of digital media is, and their expectations for its use in the short term.
- We then move on to examine how they approach the development of the digital products and platforms that increasingly underpin all businesses, and the challenges they face in doing so.
- Following on from that, we look at their working practices, and how they work with agencies.
- And finally we examine how product thinking is being adopted, the barriers to that adoption and its likely impact, now and in the future.