It’s almost never the tech stack. Solely…
I sit down with digital and marketing leaders regularly; and the same four things come up again and again.
Organisations of a certain size tend to develop the same four cracks… and they are seldom ever fixed retrospectively…
Watch where a digital leader’s week actually goes and it isn’t on strategy. It’s procurement, sign-off chains, change control… a budget built for a business that existed twelve months ago.
None of it was built on purpose. It was inherited, one CFO and one reorg at a time, until the process outlived everyone who understood why it was there.
Here’s the test.
Find the last approval that took longer than the decision really deserved. Ask who ‘designed that step’, and why. You’ll often find nobody can answer.
It’s the equivalent of leftover wiring nobody has touched since the building went up. (Still live, by the way.)
So get the five people who are involved in that process in a room for an afternoon. Not a workshop. An afternoon. Work out what’s load-bearing and what has just been left standing.
Then cut the second pile.
Digital leaders get pitched to constantly. New feature, new platform, the next must-have, before they’ve even switched on the last one.
The thing they really want costs a vendor nothing to give. And almost none of them will give it. It’s someone in the room saying: you don’t need that yet.
(Hard to say when you’re growing a business. We know!! That’s exactly why it earns trust.)
So test your own suppliers. When did one of them last talk you out of spending money with them?
If the answer is never, you already know where you stand.
Most delivery relationships run on tickets. Something breaks, someone asks, it gets handled. Fine. Forgettable.
Ask a digital leader what earns their trust most and ‘tickets’ never comes up. What comes up is the one time somebody brought them an idea nobody had asked for… and it worked. That type of value is remembered for years. Everything reactive is forgotten by next quarter, however well it was done.
So turn it on your own team. When did someone last bring you something you didn’t ask for?
Can’t remember? Check your calendar before you look at the people.
Reactive work fills every hour you hand it, and nobody schedules time for the idea nobody asked for.
So schedule it.
This is the big one.
Most digital leaders have become the single point of failure for their own organisation’s memory, because nobody ever built anything underneath them to hold what they hold. So everything runs through one person, and that person runs on whatever’s on fire that morning.
They’re holding forty conversations that all sound like the one you had with them last week.
Stop asking how to get them more hours. Ask what only exists in their head, and get it out. Written down. Handed over. Brief a second person properly rather than copying them in.
None of it is glamorous. All of it is the difference between fighting today’s fire and fighting the same fire every month for a year.
Every one of these comes down to the same test.
Was this decided by someone, on purpose? Or did it just happen, and has nobody gone back to check?
Most of what frustrates a digital leader traces back to a decision nobody ever made.
Ask yourself, which of the four is inherited in your organisation right now?