For many businesses, understanding what drives digital effectiveness is not always reflected in their digital strategies. Examining this, digital agency Code Computerlove surveyed around 500 companies on their attitudes to digital effectiveness and digital practices.

While 97% of companies surveyed say that user-centricity leads to better outcomes, only 65% say that they prioritise user needs. Setting top performing businesses and the mainstream side by side, three-quarters of top performing business say they put user needs at the heart of their development, whereas, only half of the mainstream do the same.

More than 80% of all companies surveyed say agile approaches are more likely to be more successful than traditional ones. However, only 58% adopt agile methods; this figure has plummeted to less than half (46%) of mainstream companies, only 58% of which focus on outcomes in development and are happy to adapt requirements if necessary. CEO of Code Computerlove, Tony Foggett, says, “There is clear consensus that digital approaches need to be customer-centric, agile and data-driven, all principals that fall into the ‘product thinking mindset’ that we implement. But all business – whether they are out performing their competition or not – seem a way off actually truly embracing these techniques.”

Code Computerlove’s strategy, called ‘product thinking’ is a practice set out for the purpose of maximizing the outcome that a product is intended to deliver.  The correlation between product thinking being responsible for success in top performing businesses is evident. In organisational culture, management approaches and development philosophies looked at by Code Computerlove, show organisations that pay attention to product development philosophy are more likely to be successful in revenues and impact of products and services released by organisations.