4 Key Tenets of Digital Products in the Intelligence Economy

Merry Christmas ?????? and Happy Holidays to all!! ????

Digital Transformation is all around us. Every vertical and almost in every use case one can think of, is seeing this transformation in some shape or form. The primary trigger to this steady transformation is the move from the Analog age to the Digital Age.?

The analog age started after WWII when mechanization, telephony, and electricity started reshaping our lives, our neighborhoods, careers, and cities. During the 1970s electronics enabled new capabilities that made our lives and the products we use much more interesting. Even though digital electronics have been around for a few decades, I’d argue that they were largely a variation or extension of the analog electronics. They were not paradigm shifting per se.?

However, the Digital in Digital Transformation is an entirely different breed. It is primarily driven by data, powered by AI/ML, enabled by cloud, backboned by the internet, and accessed via mobile devices. While earlier generations of this Digital Transformation largely focused on workflow automation and analytics, the current generation of this Transformation journey is paving way for entirely new innovations in products, services, business models, customer value, go-to-market, monetization, capital allocation, and more!?

Every new era brings with it products and services that have unique traits that embody the technological advantages of that era. In the Spring of 2016 I started wondering what might be the new tenets of the current generation of digital products. The question that lingered in my mind was, “if one were to innovate a new product or service from scratch, what key attributes must it embody for it to be truly digital-native?”. The image below showcases the four key tenets that digital products and services espouse.

To unpack these, let us take the example of two products all of us know very well - Google Maps and NetFlix.?

Google Maps: ?Let’s take the example of two people leaving the same location and headed to the same destination, but they leave 5 mins apart. It is likely that they are routed differently based on the multitude of factors that have changed in this short span of time! Each trip is personalized to the rider, heuristics computed in real-time,? the route and ETA calculated with high degree of precision and accuracy. Each time, the user just mentions their intent (the destination address) and the app automates and figures out the rest.?

NetFlix: We see a similar pattern here as well. The recommendation engine personalizes the options on the carousel. When we select a title, it establishes the complex streaming logistics in real-time. The engineering behind the smooth streaming experience is quite sophisticated and precise. Lastly, regardless of what device, location, and connectivity we access NetFlix from, we expect consistent experience. By clicking on the title, we declare our intent, and we expect the app to take care of the rest.?

As we look around other digital products and services - both in software form and in phygital form, we see these tenets pop up again and again consistently.?

To build a successful digital product, grokking these four tenets is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition! One needs to understand the nuances and the semantics of the move from the analog age to the digital age, and what those entail. In a subsequent article, I will dive into those elements.

Have a great Christmas and Happy Holidays!! ??????????

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