We don't need to start coding every feature into the digital solution. During the early stages of product development, we must assess where to spend our capacity and resources. Often, both business sponsors and engineers get carried away by the possibilities that a digital solution can offer. Since we have now methodically established the business outcomes, the most important product features, and the success metrics to achieve, we need to find the right fitment of solutions.

Once we have established a differentiator or an enabler, we need to explore the possible options available to us. The first step is to decide if there is even any value in building the feature. We could also look for solutions outside (off-the-shelf products) or use an open source tool or outsource (to a noncore product development team). If our feature is an enabler and if our success metrics can be achieved by an off-the-shelf tool, then we should just proceed with finding the optimal tool.

In our example from the preceding story map, our feature is to ship out a newsletter. We need to assess how the content of the newsletter will be created. The value of the newsletter is in the content it offers to the art buyer. This is the differentiator, and hence we might do well to invest heavily in content building, rather than in the process. In this context, if we assess sending newsletters by postal mail versus sending them by email, then email seems to be the lightweight option.

Now, we can also explore the best way to allow users to sign up. Sending an email seems simple enough for users, but for them to discover our email address, they're likely to be already on the website. Also, it takes additional effort for someone to sort through the email requests and maintain this list. In this context, building a simple sign-in section on the existing website and mailing to the subscribed list, might be efficient. So, we might arrive at the following journey as the most valuable experience:

We need to have a way to track the success metrics. So, this also forms our digital solution. This tracking will be not just for the metrics related to signing up, but also for us to track how many of the users who signed up converted to enquiries or sales. Again, this is an assessment about an enabler/differentiator. While the data itself is privy to us, the process of capturing the metrics may not be our differentiator. So, there is an opportunity for us to explore off-the-shelf tools that can help us to capture and report metrics.