You watched the 25th of August episode. The $18-a-month heated seats. The backlash. A year later, there was a quiet reversal. It’s a good story, and it’s easy to file away as “BMW got the pricing wrong.” That’s not what the video was actually arguing, and the difference is relevant for what you do next.
The real argument: BMW’s technology worked exactly as designed. The business logic was sound on paper. What failed was the read on what customers were willing to accept, and that gap between what’s technically possible and what people are ready for is where transformation actually starts, not in a systems roadmap.
The five questions, as a checklist
The video named five questions a leadership team should ask before choosing any technology. Here they are as a working list to run through with your own team this week, not just to read.
- Do we understand how customer expectations have changed in our market?
- Do we understand how employee expectations are changing inside our organization?
- Do we know which societal, market, and regulatory pressures will affect us in the next three to five years?
- Do we understand where trust could be either a competitive advantage or a serious risk?
- Can we translate these external forces into clear transformation priorities?
Most leadership teams can answer the first one without much trouble. Fewer can answer the third with any confidence, and almost none have turned the answers into a written priority list, which is exactly why the video treats the subject as a leadership exercise, not a technology audit.
The same person shows up three times.
One idea from the video worth sitting with longer than the few minutes it got on screen: the same person is your customer, your employee, and, somewhere, a citizen dealing with a regulator. They don’t reset their expectations when they switch roles. Someone who tracks a parcel in real time on Tuesday walks into your office Wednesday expecting the same visibility from an internal approval process and gets frustrated when it takes three weeks instead of three clicks.
This is why comparing yourself only to direct competitors undersells the problem. Your real benchmark is whatever the best digital experience that person had anywhere; in banking, in retail, and in healthcare, it quietly became their default expectation everywhere else.
Trust is the asset that most leaders undervalue.
The video’s data section is short, but the questions it raises are worth writing down: who owns the data, who controls it, who protects it, who benefits from it, and how transparently is it used? None of these are IT questions. They’re leadership questions, and most organizations discover they don’t have a clean answer to more than two of them.
What’s coming?
The 1st of September moves from society to technology, and the video is direct about what that episode won’t be: not a shopping list, not a hype reel. Once you know why transformation is needed, which is what this week’s five questions are for, the next question is which capabilities actually create value and which are just expensive.
You can run the Digital Expectations Assessment on your organization now or follow the rest of the series at the series hub.