NA Strategic Offerings

ThoughtWorks for 20+ years solved some of the most challenging problems by putting a handful of talented consultants onto the client site. The Offerings Leadership Team began to harness the insight, consulting trends and technology strategy of ThoughtWorks and the industry into a discrete set of offerings. Each offering would articulately support Demand, Delivery and TW Capability in a unique way.

We first offered Digital Platform Strategy (DPS), an approach to solve enterprise complexity allowing organizations to rapidly deliver value by exposing their core business assets. 

We would take our findings and wins from DPS to build out Product Innovation Offering which would provide our clients with the right toolsets, strategy and decision power to build meaningful products.

Our final offering Strategic Alignment (now Responsive Org) would allow organizations to enable their leadership to guide a digital first era as well as align their portfolios to build upon their business strategy.

All three of these offerings supported and were built around our Core Software Delivery which is at the heart of ThoughtWorks.

The starting point was to build a compelling vision for DPS and then sell that vision to the organization. Once the vision was widely accepted by ThoughtWorks leadership we created a business plan with new team structures, roles, execution strategy and the foundation for offering tools.

My team then brought in marketing, sales and additional design resources to create a simple (close to TW brand) microsite. This site and our key differentiator generated more inbound leads than the entire TW website. This was our initial validation around our offering and inbound only structure.

We built a variety of tools to help support the program and enable ThoughtWorkers to be empowered by rapid knowledge. Rapid knowledge was enabled by a Knowledge Library which was curated by an internal harvesting team and an Academy that could help with learning pathways.

We used these tools to upscale 80+ developers on DPS. We also developed Janet, a Slack conversational AI that could help provide instant insight to all the members and extended members of DPS. Janet was modeled after Janet in the television series The Good Place.

We have had over 1000 employees visit our suite of DPS products and nearly 50 contributors. We hope to evolve these tools to be a larger content strategy for the org and expand to our other offerings.

To help organizations with their platform journeys we developed phase one of a three phase rollout for a Platform Maturity Model. With the help of our demand and platform specialists, phase one encompassed the ability to identify where an organization was progressing to platform empowerment.

Phase two and three are still in the discovery phase but they will be focused on self assessment as a tool for growth and ThoughtWorks indirect sales.

ThoughtWorks was able to utilize and evolve our offerings with Telus Digital where we were on the ground with Digital Platform Strategy and Strategic Alignment and now Product Innovation.

With Responsive Org we took a different approach for the look and feel, opening up a bit of creative business aesthetics that could demonstrate the complexity of the offering.

Building upon 25 years of ThoughtWorks history, the Head of Technology and I constructed a global document to illustrate what ThoughtWorks unique technology strategy included. The main goal was to align the organization around an evolving core set of principles, practices and offerings.

As we continued to harvest tools, reusable code, products etc my team and I developed a framework and new engagement model that allowed for cross pollination of solutions that support our offerings. This new model allowed us to not only examine our org but also the organizations we work with to help accelerate their business with near ready solutions.

Offerings were instrumental in the sale of ThoughtWorks and has been absorbed globally to help ensure the growth of the company in our five year plan.I am currently still involved with Product Innovation and the brand new Design Offering as an advisor and offering demand partner in the West.I also drive Design, Product Innovation, DPS, Responsive Org across many of our clients in the West.