Agile Digital Transformation – key lessons learned after 50 episodes

We recently reached an important milestone for our podcast Agile Digital Transformation with the release of episode number 50 at the end of January. We topped this off in March by getting featured on Feedspot’s list of the top 35 digital transformation podcasts.

In this article, we’d like to go over some of the top takeaways and lessons learned after 50 episodes of Agile Digital Transformation. We’ll cover the top content takeaways in the first half, then close with some essential tips for producing and running a quality podcast in the second half. Let’s get started!

 

Key takeaways from the conversations

1. Digital transformation is as much about the people as it is about technology. 

This point has been a very frequent focus during our episodes. We like to bust the myth of digital transformation being all about technology and instead delve deeper into the considerations related to people, who are after all both creators and users of these digital technologies.

2. Digital transformation is not possible without a mindset shift.

One of the most essential people challenges is being able to make the mindset shift necessary to embrace digital transformation – and help your employees do the same. Without this, people won’t be likely to adopt any new technologies, or, if they do, won’t be able to make the best use of it.

3. Progress is not possible without overcoming resistance to change.

A key step in the aforementioned mindset shift is overcoming resistance to change and learning to embrace change and uncertainty. This makes it much easier to adapt to new situations quickly and enables true innovation by allowing you to leave your comfort zone and truly think outside the box.

4. Digital transformation relies on data.

You can’t fully embrace everything the digital offers if you’re not driven by data. Data gives you a real-time insight into the habits and interests of your customers and other stakeholders, allowing you to craft customer-focused personalized content and experiences. You can’t go on by just relying on your intuition; you need to pair it with data.

5. Because of the reliance on data, privacy is a key element of digital transformation.

With great data comes great responsibility. Effective, customer-centered use of data also means responsible use which puts privacy first. Be transparent about your data collection and usage; don’t collect more data and keep it longer than you need; make sure you’re legally compliant with all the privacy regulations that affect you, e.g. GDPR.

6. Agility is indispensable in the fast-moving digital landscape.

Agility is where the people and the technology aspects of digital transformation truly come together. The abundance of data, new technologies and new competition requires businesses to move quickly, leveraging both digital tools and agile processes to achieve that. Agility is thus at the core of a successful digital business.

 

Tips for a quality technology podcast

Find a podcast hosting platform that best fits your needs. We ended up deciding on Buzzsprout, which is affordable and easy to use; most importantly, it automatically takes care of publishing the episode on all the channels and platforms we want it to. This is essentially COPE (create once, publish everywhere) par excellence – we only need to manually publish the episode on Buzzsprout, and in our CMS to have the content be live on our own domain.

Provide transcripts and/or captions to improve the experience and make your podcast more accessible. It’s wise to automate your transcription to save some time.

Try to include both in-depth and also surface-level information – both are important, because you never know how much a listener already knows about a given topic and how much they consequently want to learn about it. As usual, of course, it depends on who you’re targeting, but if you’re speaking about a new trend or technology, chances are at least some of the listeners don’t yet know enough about it to immediately go all-in on the nitty gritty.

Bear in mind that a genuine conversation is more engaging than just a Q & A type of interview – which makes it more enjoyable for all the participants, as well as the listeners. Spice up the conversation by asking follow-up questions, offering your own insights, etc. to keep the conversation flowing.

If possible, have a few minutes of unrecorded conversation to ease into it. Let the guests know about the specifics of the recording process and go through certain parts together if needed. Confirm things such as the right pronunciation of names before starting the recording to ensure less necessary post-editing (this is especially important if you also use video, since it’s much harder to do a lot of editing seamlessly with video).

 

Wrapping up

We hope these first-hand experiences and practices will provide you with some basic orientation when coming up with and launching your own technology podcast. If you’re more interested in getting featured on a podcast rather than launching one, feel free to reach out to us and let us know what you’d like to talk about as our guest.