The digital leader: The one hire your business needs

As the champion of both the customer experience and digital roadmap, the secret to a successful team is a great leader.

As the champion of both the customer experience and digital roadmap, the secret to a successful team is a great leader.

by Katie Wishlade, Partner, Wilson Fletcher

Never in its history has design been so valued in business. Traditional organisations of all types — from management consultants to retailers and banks — are recognising the crucial role that design plays and are either building or buying in design skills at a rate of knots. At long last, everyone’s looking to build the perfect design capability.

In the last six months, we’ve received numerous briefs asking for help to ‘upskill’ in-house teams. These briefs all highlight the same objectives and ask for the same deliverables, which is remarkable given that they’re coming from vastly different companies. As any former head of transformation or director of disruption will tell you, we are a very trend-based industry. When it comes to a team’s culture and processes, adopting the latest buzz-approach and attempting to do what everyone else is doing can be dangerous.

Innovation remains a frustrating pursuit. Failure rates are high and even successful companies can’t sustain their performance. The root cause is that companies fall into the trap of adopting whatever best practices are in vogue or aping the exemplar innovation of the moment.

Gary P. Pisano, [Harvard Business Review](https://hbr.org/2015/06/you-need-an-innovation-strategy), June 2015

It should come as no surprise that there are multiple variations of the in-house/out-house model in play: every organisation is unique and has its own multitude of factors influencing the dynamics of the digital team. An organisation’s shape, history and digital maturity; the market and environment it operates in; the individual personalities involved and the often overwhelming impact of the organisational culture all affect what will and won’t work.

But one ingredient that will always be essential in any organisation is strong design leadership: a vocal champion for the importance of the customer experience. The first step in defining the right formula must be to hire experienced design leaders who have the judgement to continually propose and evaluate the shape and makeup of their digital team. These people understand where the team’s skillset is strong, where it needs to improve and, sometimes more importantly, where it doesn’t. These leaders can judge what they should be doing in-house, as well as understanding if, when and how they should engage with external partners.

Design leaders understand the different capabilities that in-house teams and external design partners have and what they can offer the design process. Let’s not forget, the underlying characteristics of each are inherently different. An in-house team is embedded in the organisation, whether that be a bank, retailer or broadcaster, and this means they are focused on their own business, typically comparing themselves to their direct competitors. An external partner, by contrast, typically works across multiple sectors, with multiple types of organisation and can provide a broader and more objective perspective.

Due to their embedded nature, internal teams can often get caught up with the constant pressure to launch products, losing the ability to pull back and frame a problem instead of jumping in and trying to solve it. They are simply too close to the problem and all the small details that impact it. External teams provide fresh perspectives, broader influences and new thinking but are rarely in touch enough with internal agendas to make the bestdecisions for the business. In our experience, the best results come from blending the advantages of both. We certainly always do our best work alongside smart internal teams.

But let’s take a step back and remember who we are doing this for — customers. And what do customers care about? It’s certainly not the skillset of your internal team or even the process by which the product they use was made. They just care that it’s great. Obviously, from a business perspective, customers equal revenue, loyalty and brand advocacy. You simply can’t afford to deprioritise their needs.

In today’s competitive market, organisations need to use whatever methods and processes they can to ensure their products are always world-class: customers simply won’t wait around for them to upskill.