7 digital product engineering strategies that fail

Today we tour the enterprise cell block at the overcrowded prison of digital strategy failure. Peer macabrely through the bars at the criminally negligent digital software, hardware, and product strategies that victimize well-intended enterprise product teams.

All digital product engineering plans start with the best of intentions. Most of them fail.

Whether stricken by exogenous transgressors, stakeholder hubris, misaligned counterparties, or good old-fashioned bullshit, all digital product development failures pursued an approach that was never going to work and failed to pressure test it.

This, our rogue's gallery of ill-fated digital product development approaches, highlights the most alluring yet dangerous culprits. Next time you're engaged in a SWOT analysis, risk mitigation exercise, or scanning for trouble through your binoculars alongside the stalwart members of your corporate neighborhood watch, memorize these scoundrels to keep safe.

This begins when a slick technologist says, in 50x more words, "alignment of business goals + customer desires + develop capabilities = magic¹".

Mechanism: Endless Agile sprints of design and development until you say "stop!"
Perp: Tech design/build professional services (PS) firms.
Moment it fails: If you're lucky, when the PoC underwhelms. If you're not, when the launch does.
Keeps happening because: Success and failure both generate opportunities for the PS firm.

¹Magic not included.

Why does it fail?

Pure intentions don't mesh with impure realities. That document-heavy user experience design system and target persona you began with took a lot of effort for no tangible result. When the weeks pass and doubt germinates, your UX becomes a strategic myopia that degrades into solutioneering against known problems while simultaneously failing to discover novel, hidden, often internal customer challenges. Before you know it, you've got a five-person team shoveling designs and code into a repo at high burn, constructing a solution that's objectively un-special, differentiated in ways that you'll notice but your customer won't. If your research does yield genuine novelty, you'll know it because solutions practically create themselves once you're positioned to see a true problem.

Ultimately, PS firms want you on the sauce, which means writing you code that requires your continuous input. Agile's the cocaine, they're the cartel.

"Sacrificial concepts" march to the altar. In lieu of a strategy or viable plan, product managers overexperiment to appease an animistic belief in an unslakeable god of failure that must be gratified before success can emerge from the volcano unburned. This is the brute force method a computer would use to design something there was no training data for.

Mechanism: Unending PoCs and science experiments that prove feasibility but not viability.
Perp: Internal digital teams.
Moment it fails: When the concepts yield nothing worth dedicating production resources to.
Keeps happening because: Digital initiative owners often aren't connected to the core business.

Why does it fail?

Valuable experiments require experiment design, trials, data collection, and synthesis within context. Soldering wires and sensors to your product and connecting that to a cloud platform only proves that you can do those specific things—it doesn't prove that your connected product is viable, desirable, scalable, manufacturable, or has any right to a continued existence.

Uncontrolled experimentation is trying to punch a hole through the mountain while standing right next to the helicopter and a waiting pilot. It's the costliest, slowest way to learn what you already know.

There's a messianic component to this old saw: "consultants are going to come in, learn everything they need to know, discover new stuff, tell us the key pieces we're missing, and we'll right the ship." Is anyone that omnipotent?

Mechanism: Consultants show up and derail you instead of coming in alongside.
Perp: Big consultancies and senior managers hoping for a big change.
Moment it fails: Does it ever succeed?
Keeps happening because: Nobody knows what else to do.

Why does it fail?

Insight and results, like strategy and execution, are two sides of the same coin. Unending research can eventually produce insight, but in business, said insight needs to be actionable to be valuable. Furthermore, you're already an expert in your domain, so truly novel insights will be rare to you.

As the customer of a consulting firm, it's partly your responsibility to set those consultants up for success by removing bad choices, things you've already tried, and obvious (to you) go-nowhere objectives from their mission. They'll probably fight you at first, but if you can hit back with evidence, they'll listen—they're corporate vampires and spreadsheet jockeys, sure, but they don't actually want to fail you. Narrow the field so they can direct their energy effectively. Otherwise, you'll just pay someone to learn your business, then bail.

New shinies captivate someone in upper management, usually that already-accomplished person who reads too many LinkedIn articles about what someone else's clickbait hook claims they "wish they would've known about X". Unfortunately for you and your team, X is the thing you do. Lose the will to resist, and before you know it, you're AI-blitzscaling blockchains into lunar post-capitalism.

Mechanism: Forwarded emails suggesting cringey fad techs and methods.
Perp: Senior executives, strategy types, and people who fancy themselves strategic.
Moment it fails: When a P&L owner figures out fad X creates work instead of benefits.
Keeps happening because: Bosses want to get ahead of the other guy, tech people want to work on cool new stuff instead of hard boring stuff.

Why does it fail?

It's children's baseball—when someone hits a grounder, the whole defense chases the ball and leaves the bases ripe for the plucking. When chasing shiny objects, your concern's core work goes undone, you get caught behind schedule, and find yourself unexpectedly superfluous.

Now, the on-high strategists have a point: organizations habitually lose perspective and routinely resist change. The squawking emanating from below does always sounds the same. Bosses hunger for new insight and yearn to see aspiring underlings try things. Unfortunately, seagulling fad concepts onto their staff won't inspire valuable action. This phenomenon might never go away, but it's important to know when you're stuck in it.

"We can just partner with so-and-so/integrate with X and check that box. Done!"

The perennial easy button, partnering with another company to gain a digital capability allows you to skip all the pain, hassle, and expense of gaining a new capability while simultaneously absolving yourself of the responsibility for the quality of said capability. Instead, you get to feel powerful for negotiating a deal that benefits both parties. Win-win?

Mechanism: Big-talk mergers, JVs, acquisitions, contracts, and the corresponding pageantry.
Perp: A conspiracy between product owners and senior managers.
Moment it fails: Worker-detectable almost immediately. Business-detectable after its implementation offers zero revenue or profit lift.
Keeps happening because: It's usually 80% desired-state magical thinking. Even if the partner's offering is perfect, internal absorption capabilities have limits.

Why does it fail?

Not for the reason you think—being hostage to some product/service isn't terrible as there are usually alternatives. This fails because if a partner offers it, it's not a unique advantage for you. These moves frequently dilute impact.

Partnerships should be entered into, but only for undeniably right reasons. If the ultimate outcome is likely to be (or already shaping up to be) "just OK", you're eating empty calories with your acquisition budget. Some technologies and firms reveal themselves as obviously bad fits after your business wedding, and interestingly, that's a better outcome than an "aggressively benign" partner who becomes dead weight you absorb and don't lose.

Months of planning, stacks of documents, and an uncountable number of assurances gave birth to a monstrous digital program. This beast eats departments, budgets, and leaders for breakfast, lunch, and dinner while crushing stakeholder expectations under its tremendous weight, dashing the hopes of those line-level producers it was intended to help most of all. It's run amok and won't conclude (and it's probably an ERP).

Mechanism: Your business commits to creating a digital solution it can't reasonably operate.
Perp: Rising stars, sadly.
Moment it fails: Either this initiative loses touch with what matters or what matters changes.
Keeps happening because: Salesmanship and action bias are the ultimate codependent psychological relationship.

Why does it fail?

Slow? Yes. Expensive? Very much so—at least triple what you planned for. It drained everyone's will to work. How many months went by when the only thing you made progress on was your progress reports?

However, the primary reason leviathan projects fail is that the situation they're built to address changes underneath them multiple times throughout their construction. Worse, that situation may have only ever been a blip on your business's market radar in the first place.

If you're building a digital product inside a non-digital business, your offering must deliver value within six months of its official development kickoff. Leviathan may ultimately be what you see in the rear view mirror as a result, and it may be your vision, but it can't be your action plan.

A network effect is the idea that something becomes more valuable the more people use it. Therefore, your marketers just need to get people on the product/system at all costs. After that, you create a paid service tier ladder customers can climb as they find the offering more and more valuable and bam, 10x valuation to the moon. While both concepts are real, successful examples are exceptionally rare.

Mechanism: Unrelenting faith in the idea that "if you build it, they will come".
Perp: The unholy union of growth-hacking marketers and absolutely certain technologists.
Moment it fails: The instant you pin hopes on it.
Keeps happening because: People believe in big wins, and many small wins combined over a decade look like one big win.

Why does it fail?

Network effects only become possible when your product's target audience is everybody: social media, dating, general e-commerce, weight loss pills, etc. Your employer's connected vending machine will need a real, targeted go-to-market strategy instead.

Even when your strategy's square, there's still an awful lot of luck and externality involved in creating traction, let alone growth. "It takes 10 years to make an overnight success" and that sort of thing. A "viral" moment is something you seize if you find it, not something you generate intentionally from scratch.

If you need help escaping any of the troublemakers above, contact Next Mile for an expert extraction and a viable plan that prevents you from becoming another unfortunate victim.