How do you know that your digital transformation is going to be successful?

One thing that crystallized that for me was when one of my mentors told me that not making a decision is a decision. It's a decision to do nothing, to leave the status quo as it is. And that really helped me think about the speed at which we make decisions. If we waffle on it, we're deciding not to take a risk or more likely we're deciding not to take smaller risks while we're taking the bigger risk of fading away into irrelevance as we fail to adapt to the changing circumstances around us.

If you really do embrace a new way of doing work and you put in the mechanisms around the weekly sprints and the retrospectives, you're iterating. It is amazing to me, some of the stuff that we'll roll out just to get feedback quickly and iterate. And then a week later we come out and have improved a part of that. That's one way that we really pay attention to measuring things as well. And we always start with the customer. You always have that customer centric view of what you're doing and why you're doing what you're doing. And if you stay with that as the focus, usually you don't go wrong and you get to where you need to be. It is a different mindset in how you go about it. It doesn't have to be perfect starting out, but get it there, get the feedback, iterate on it. And then you get a  real-time measurement of success. If you're just going slow and not getting stuff done, it's immediate and you see it, and you have to step it up. In the old way, we spent 9 months to a year before we got any feedback.

I totally agree with that. The only person who can tell you whether you built the right thing is the customer who's going to buy it.

That's the beauty of what you've seen in the transformation. I mean, you look at just how we consume apps on our phones. How many stars do we give it? The first thing we do before we download an app, we go read the reviews on it. It's really changed the game. Immediate feedback has really changed how we view success as well. If you're not four or five stars and I see some three or two, I won't even consider it a lot of the time. I'll read a few reviews and then all right, done. Let's find the four or five starred one.