Digital Product Architecture and Customer Agility: Evidence from New Digital Ventures

Abstract

New digital ventures are transforming the world around us. Born-digital companies (such as Uber) that were initially established to serve a specific market can quickly detect new opportunities in other markets and respond to these opportunities by reassembling their resources with speed and ease. Limited research has investigated how product architecture enables or hinders the ability of the firm to sense customer-related opportunities and respond to them effectively. By examining two new digital ventures, this study sheds light on new digital ventures’ customer agility. Specifically, we address how the characteristics of new digital ventures’ product architectures facilitate or hinder the development of the customer-sensing and customer-responding capability dimensions of customer agility. We present theoretical and managerial implications regarding how to leverage digital technologies to foster customer agility.