Product Engineering is King, Low Code is Key and Other Takeaways from the Forrester Digital Transformation Conference 2018

Martin Gill, VP, Research Director for Forrester, is a flamboyant speaker and was the perfect choice to deliver the kickoff for their Digital Transformation Conference. His opening slide, “Technology changes everything,” was delivered with his signature passion and flair and seemed obvious, at first blush. But then he hit the crowd with a profound qualifier: “But only if you own it.”

The simple yet profound statement led me to consider the topic on everyone’s mind – digital business transformation – through the multifaceted lens of how businesses can own their own technological evolutions.

Speed matters, and it matters a lot, to CarMax CIO Shamim Mohammad. Speed of delivery, combined with maturity, efficiency and reliability is an integral part of their competitive strategy. This simple idea – to go from idea to execution – is easier said than done.

When it comes to obstacles to agility, IT has been the department of “No,” or at best, “Slow.” Striving for faster and more nimble operations, most large enterprises wrestle with the conflict between what business leaders want and what IT can actually deliver in a reasonable time, cost and quality. At the conference, it was evident that organizations are employing two distinct strategies to resolve this disconnect – Product Engineering and Low Code.

While Product Engineering is centered on the premise of radically reorganizing the business around integrated cross-functional teams, engineering remains an exacting task. Low Code, meanwhile, introduces automation to confront the reality that the IT industry is among the most manual industries in the world. Low Code encourages “citizen developers,” which empowers in-house talent to build industrial-grade applications with drag-and-drop tools and less actual manually written code.

This approach allows the best of both worlds – IT maintains control of the Low Code platform and responsibility for making enterprise data available via API’s, while citizen developers are able to build real business applications. Large swaths of problems, such as streamlining inefficient, manual and paper-based processes can be achieved much faster.

Low Code vendors like Outsystems, Mendix, Zudy and Appian were at the Forrester Conference in strength. So was the evidence and case examples of real adoption in large enterprises. An executive from the Corteva agriculture division of DowDuPont observed, “20% of our teams used to get assigned to an IT priority, while 80% were left to fend for their own.” Low Code has been a smashing success – they have 157 applications created by citizen developers. Brooks Brothers developed a store excellence solution to automate all their store processes using another Low Code platform.

Meanwhile, in session after session, the recurring message was that business leaders have realized that their company’s digital maturity determines how quickly and effectively they are able to navigate rapidly changing customer expectations and competitive disruption.

This reinforces what I’m observing in my work at Publicis.Sapient with clients across industries. We’re consistently engaging with senior executives to move their operating models and structures from departmental projects to fully empowered, multidisciplinary and agile product teams organized around business goals and customer journeys. These teams use rapid, sustained “test-and-learn” tactics, fueled by world-class engineering and devops practices to confidently deploy production code, often with dramatically lower change failure rates and industrial-grade reliability.

Product Engineering is helping businesses make this pivot. CarMax has moved from a project-based company to a product-centric company, according to Shamim.

“We took away the boundaries between siloes – marketing, operations, IT – and physically changed the space that our teams operated in. We are now organized into cross-functional product teams and how we measure success has also changed.”

When implemented effectively, agile Product Engineering teams deliver faster time to market, lower risk and better quality than traditional project-based approaches. Shamim made the compelling argument that these teams are the engine powering transformation. They emphasize maturity, efficiency and reliability as key to enabling the business to rapidly bring new ideas to market, and experiment with what he termed “boring deployments” to achieve innovation without betting the farm.

Low Code and Product Engineering are both strategies to deal with the reality that technology is completely intertwined in business, and that speed matters in today’s world. Almost every time, rapid “test and learn” with customer feedback trumps big projects. At a conference with innumerable insights and stimulating conversations, my most crucial takeaway was that Digital Business Transformation truly is the need of the hour. Digital strategy is inseparable from business strategy, and Product Engineering and Low Code are burgeoning tactics with big implications that every senior business leader should care about.