What Adobe’s Experience Led Growth Message Means for IT Leaders

Last week in New York, Adobe reiterated its Experience Led Growth message. IT leaders may be tempted to dismiss it as marketing-focused. That would be a mistake. Here’s what it means to you.

As an IT leader, you may not be paying too much attention to Adobe’s recent experience led growth (what it calls XLG) messaging — but you should be.

Last week, Adobe came to New York — home to many important clients — and reiterated the XLG message that it introduced at its Adobe Summit this past march in Las Vegas.

According to the company, experience led growth is the natural evolution of the various product-led, marketing-led, and sales-led growth efforts of the recent past. The XLG vision brings them all together in service of the customer and the experience they demand.

If you’ve been following my work, that probably sounds a little familiar.

And if you’re an enterprise IT leader scratching your head wondering what any of this has to do with you, it’s also your clue.

XLG = The True Essence of Digital Transformation

I’ve been talking about digital transformation since long before it became today’s über buzzword. And for almost as long, I’ve been lamenting that the industry was oversimplifying things and getting it wrong.

The reason is that digital transformation has never been about technology, per se. It’s always been about a shift in power to the customer and the fact that in the digital era organizations are competing based on the (mostly digital) experiences they deliver.

And when the digital experience becomes the driver of business value, the entire business and operating model guiding most enterprises gets turned upside down.

The essence of Adobe’s experience led growth messaging is this upending of the traditional growth and go-to-market strategies. It demands that organizations break through functional and technological silos and make the customer — and the experiences they demand — the center of everything they do.

And that is the true essence of digital transformation.

Adobe’s Vision is Incomplete (but It’s Not Its Fault)

Still, for all its virtue, Adobe’s vision is incomplete.

Adobe is still a technology company and its vision is necessarily self-serving. It’s intended to create a compelling narrative that links all of the company’s applications, solutions, and services together into a cohesive whole.

And it does a damn fine job of it.

To paraphrase Adobe’s executives, it’s about bringing together content, data, customers, and product and infusing it with AI to express ideas and personalize and power winning experiences.

Frankly, if all you did was buy into this vision and reliably execute on it, you’d be miles ahead of most of your competitors. But alas, this vision is necessarily incomplete because it is bound by Adobe’s solution set.

As an IT leader, you are not quite so lucky. You must address a much larger remit. You must create an integrated enterprise tech stack that delivers on this vision across the totality of your technology estate.

But what is interesting is that the underlying premise of experience led growth — that you must use the experience as a lever to transcend the org chart and deliver transformative experiences at scale and velocity — is an extensible philosophy that you can and should leverage as a guiding light as you build out and deploy your enterprise tech stack.

Building the Enterprise XLG Capability

I’m hearing fresh concerns from enterprise IT leaders about having to fight anew for a seat at the strategic enterprise table. I find this development ironic given the outsized role that technology has played for enterprises throughout the pandemic and its aftermath, but it’s indicative of several forces at play.

The first is the sheer complexity of managing the enterprise tech stack. Despite momentarily pulling IT leaders into the strategic spotlight at the height of the pandemic, the complex magnitude of the tech stack quickly pulled most IT leaders right back into fighting the daily battles of just keeping everything running.

If anything, the pandemic brought even greater diversity of technology and thus increased the complexity and management overhead facing enterprise IT leaders.

But the second challenge is more of your own making.

As technologists, we can’t help but be enamored with the technology itself and to see the world through the lens of technology-centered projects.

But as we’ve discussed, the true essence of digital transformation is an experience-led shift in power that unseats the very business and operating models that most of the tech stack exists to support. The inevitable result is a struggle for balance.

On the one hand, you have a mandate to keep the vast technology machinery running. On the other, you need to help your organization transcend its historical footing to reinvent itself around the experience and new ways of going to market.

It’s no easy task. But leveraging the ethos of experience led growth may well be a pathway to finding and maintaining this balance.

Adopting it naturally forces you — and the entire leadership team — to look at how you assemble your tech stack and supporting organizational capabilities in service of the digital experience. It allows you to transcend organizational silos and creates a definitive and unified set of business drivers for your efforts.

While adopting the experience led growth ethos is no panacea — there will be much heavy lifting required — it may be a useful tool that elevates the conversation, positions technology in its proper role in the enterprise, and provides a common frame-of-reference that brings the entire enterprise leadership team together.

Not bad work for a vendor-driven vision.

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