Digital success is a moving target. Building a well-resourced and dynamic digital team that can continuously help refine the digital strategy — and lead execution of that strategy — is the best way to master continuous change. Often, digital teams also have other, soft accountabilities, such as driving digital culture, raising digital competencies across the organization, and uplifting digital maturity.

A leaner, more nimble structure that allows decision-making to take place closer to customers will help accelerate change. To rapidly adapt to future customer needs, digital teams must prioritize rapid prototyping and continuous improvement within an organizational structure that’s customer-centric, cross-functional, and flexible. Digital teams must shift from:

Project-Centric To Customer-Centric by focusing resources accountability on customer outcomes. Digital leaders must reduce decision cycles and reorient their teams around delivering end-to-end customer experiences. Placing the customer at the heart of everything the firm does helps bridge the strategy and execution gap and undo legacy structures, operating models, budgets, and politics.

Siloed To Cross-Functional by embracing cross-functional collaboration to speed up digital delivery. Functional silos — whether formed around product, process, or technology — must give way to organizational structures in which smaller, multidimensional teams focus on enabling customer outcomes. Collaboration and common metrics are key to connecting accountability.

Rigid To Flexible by combining flexible structures with defined processes and skills. To deliver customer outcomes faster, digital leaders must accelerate delivery, with teams that work fluidly, follow agile principles, and own ideation, development, and maintenance processes to keep handoffs to other teams at a minimum. These teams follow a customer-led, design-deliver-refine approach to continuously move toward the goals set by digital strategy.

To learn more about building a digital team, check out Forrester’s latest reports on establishing and developing high-performance digital teams and embracing new organizational structures, or set up an inquiry call with myself, Dan Bieler, or Oliwia Berdak.