Over the last several years, customers, employees, and partners have become tech-savvy users whose expectations of ‘Give me more and deliver it fast’ require manageable solutions. The desire to interact with digital ecosystems any where anytime demands that today’s businesses create personalized and frictionless experiences to create value for its end users. It’s a recipe that must be followed exactly in order to remain relevant. When done correctly, enhancing consumer’s daily lives with digital touch points goes far beyond creating a new website, a flashy app, or a 'unified' omnichannel experience. The end goal is to construct memorable experiences in a never-ending cycle that increase the ability to retain, convert, and enrich the relationship between businesses and their users.

In simple terms, a digital journey is a context aware interaction between an end user and a brand or business, where by the interaction becomes a conversation in which technology facilitates a powerful experience that builds deep emotional connections by incorporating three key values: simplification, surprise, and anticipation.

SIMPLIFICATION is all about minimizing complexity in products, services, or technology yet providing comprehensive functionality.

SURPRISE is at the core of an emotional experience that delights the user yet also helps understand them and their needs with greater precision and predictability.

ANTICIPATION is all about enabling rich connections timed to help the user move forward with their objective, whether that is discovery or completing a tasks or set of tasks.

To create digital journeys, however, requires a confluence of talent, agility, and a corporate culture that promotes innovation, experience design, and technology. You need a new kind of corporate structure and flexibility to help them integrate their various business units and create an emotionally engaging digital conversation with their customers. You need a collaborative approach that would permit engineering and design teams to work side by side quickly and efficiently, and at scale, to reach their consumer and business goals. At the heart of a successful business strategy is a customer experience that is elegantly simple

and positive, where consumers are likely to come away satisfied and return. This type of experience is designed by understanding the emotion of end users throughout a journey involving the company’s products and services. The goal is to maximize positive emotion.

To create digital journeys, however, requires a confluence of talent, agility, and a corporate culture that promotes innovation, experience design, and technology

In today’s market place, time to market is a chief concern for any business trying to establish or drive digital journeys. Delivering the best experience establishes emotional bonds that last. Arriving late renders a negative impact, a low to no return, and a lackluster effect that lowers brand equity instead of boosting it. To meet these diverse challenges, teams need to be reworked so that design and engineering work together. What’s more, motivational drivers need to be aligned and emphasized to forge a culture of innovation.

Where to Start?
First, a top-level management decision had to be crafted with a coherent budget. Second, a team had to be assembled, relevant and well versed in the latest technologies. Third, a culture needed to be fostered that inspired innovation and allowed employees to explore and imagine these new journeys. Finally, a proper approach is required to drive and continuously evolve these goals. This approach is known as ‘agile pods’ that helped nurture and propel agility and team maturity throughout these digital journeys.

Pods are cells comprising designers and engineers with an assortment of digital skills and talents. Typically, a pod has eight to ten team members spanning creative, engineering, and test automation skill sets, all of whom have a shared responsibility for the outcome of a project. Similar to cells in living organisms, pods have all the equipment and expertise necessary to carry out their functions. They can grow and evolve, maintain the health of the team, and can even replicate themselves. Typically small, they are sometimes part of a larger organism in this case, a pod ecosystem. As in nature, where there are different kinds of cells, not all pods are equal, and their characteristics will depend on the function to be performed, which may evolve over time. In a large digital transformation initiative, being able to structure an ecosystem of pods brings the scalability, collaboration, and cost effectiveness any large organization will demand.

In this new era, the bar for businesses has been raised considerably around digital technologies. In order to compete, and to have a rich digital conversation with consumers and employees, companies need to be nimble. The first step to that agility is having creative and engineering functions integrated, which helps to ensure a frictionless customer experience. Integration also allows for faster delivery, faster pivots, and cost efficiencies. In order to have sustainable innovation, companies have to nurture it, and pods allow for that kind of evolution. Kickstarted and supported by consistent top management alignment, once pods mature, they can become viral, forming an ecosystem that provides the cultural and methodological structure to contain, measure, and foster a never-ending digital journey. The journey of the consumer and employee, in a continuous experience improvement loop, is the same as the journey of the business, also incrementally adding value and increasing returns, listening better and adapting faster. Pods help build the next generation of digital talent savvy with the viral potential to evolve the DNA that helps companies to ‘reload’ as digital natives.