Nilanjan Adhya

I help organizations leverage the power of digital platforms to improve marketing and product experiences and innovate on go-to-market. When organizations succeed at this, it inevitably results in a rethinking of their business models. It provokes product teams to rethink how products can be built more like lego blocks and thereby shorten product release cycles. It encourages marketing and sales to extend beyond their traditional operational boundaries. It demands that teams adopt a new way of working — more agile, more data-driven, and much more experimental. I have been on this journey first at IBM and now at BlackRock. Digital Transformation is now considered an important priority in every organization across every industry. For most organizations, the 2020 pandemic forced “five years worth of digital transformation in five months.” But it wasn’t always this way. Back in 2015, when I started talking to teams about the need to digitally transform, I would be lucky if they didn’t immediately hang up on me or politely mention that it wasn’t among their top 20 priorities for the year. Most product teams thought digital transformation had something to do with marketing — wasn’t it about using social media to generate more leads? In a few years, we have come a long way in developing an understanding of what digital transformation truly is — but we still have many misconceptions to address. For one, many still believe that digital transformation is mainly a technology-centric transformation — something on the side that the “IT folks” can do. There is also a common misconception that digital transformation is only relevant to some kinds of products — more for consumer-centric products but less important for B2B products. In my role as CDO, I have busted these myths and still continue to do so. For me, digital transformation is really about new ways of engaging with customers. It is about building new experiences and dramatically improving existing ones. When a product experience becomes exceptional, it creates viral loops that open up new growth opportunities and creates new business opportunities. I have spoken and written extensively about this. That said, the journey of creating better experiences can never be over. That's why I enjoy what I do so much!