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At the recent GDS Digital Innovation Summit in Boston, I had the opportunity to discuss a critical challenge in modern digital product development: creating seamless, adaptive multi-device experiences.
As the digital landscape expands, users interact with brands across a growing number of devices—from desktops and mobile phones to wearables, kiosks, and even smart home appliances. Delivering cohesive and frictionless experiences across these touchpoints is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. Here are the top insights I shared to help brands create the necessary experiences their customers now demand.
Meet Your Users Where They Are
Today’s consumers expect real-time access to services and products that seamlessly integrate into their lives. They switch between devices effortlessly, whether they’re booking a flight on a desktop while in the office, checking in on their mobile device as they get ready in the morning, or interacting with digital signage at the airport. Companies that fail to meet users where they are risk losing engagement, loyalty, and, ultimately, revenue.
Moreover, multi-device experiences are becoming increasingly important as digital access expands. U.S. households own 60% more connected devices today than they did five years ago.1 The blurring lines between physical and digital experiences—often referred to as "endpoint sprawl"—make it imperative for businesses to adopt a strategic, multi-device approach.
Why Most Companies Struggle
Despite this clear demand, many companies struggle to deliver unified digital experiences. The main reason? A reliance on outdated development methodologies and tools, resulting in organizational complexity and slower time to market. Your users feel the pain of your strategic decisions with divided teams working across web, iOS, Android, and other platforms (often operating independently), leading to inconsistent user experiences and inefficient development cycles.
One striking example from the summit highlighted a company managing 17 different agile teams just to deliver a single digital experience. This level of fragmentation slows innovation and creates bottlenecks in decision-making. Product teams are left with a difficult trade-off: either launch incomplete experiences quickly, or wait multiple cycles to deliver fully integrated solutions. And what's more, they often miss key learning opportunities either way.
Challenges With the Current Delivery Approach
While platform specialization may be needed to deliver certain experiences, it comes with significant challenges:
- Inconsistent user experiences across device types.
- Increased team complexity, leading to higher coordination costs and slower innovation cycles.
- Higher development costs due to operating multiple teams
- Difficult scope decisions as product teams struggle to balance cost and ROI.
The Solution: Adaptive Platforms & Generative AI
To address these challenges, I introduced a new paradigm: adaptive platforms powered by cross-platform development frameworks and generative AI.
- Cross-Platform Development: Instead of maintaining separate codebases for each device, modern frameworks like Flutter allow teams to write once and deploy across multiple devices. This approach reduces development costs, speeds up iteration cycles, and ensures design consistency.
I strongly recommend VGV’s ebook Enterprise Tech Teams and Flutter to learn more about how Flutter helps high-performing apps and organizations. - Generative AI for Personalization: AI-driven data insights can dynamically tailor experiences based on user context. Imagine an e-commerce app that adapts its interface depending on whether a user is on a smartphone, smart TV, or voice assistant—automatically optimizing the experience for each modality. Pretty cool, right?
- Real-Time Data Synchronization: Businesses must ensure that data flows seamlessly across devices. For instance, a user pausing a video on one device should be able to resume on another instantly, mirroring best practices seen in platforms like Netflix.
Emerging Best Practices for Multi-Device Delivery
With the right frameworks in place, brands can see incredible benefits:
- Use a single codebase to eliminate the need for platform-specific teams
- Leverage features like hot reload, pre-built widgets, and automated testing to accelerate development
- Focus on declarative UI programming and efficient state management to improve the developer experience
- Strategically use plugins and packages to create near-native experiences
And that’s just the beginning. By switching to a multi-device model, brands see:
- Faster time to market (up to 62%!)2
- Scalability across product features and organizations
- Reduced turnover from happier development teams
To discover how multi-platform frameworks like Flutter can accelerate digital product delivery and drive business impact, be sure to check out The Business Value of Flutter whitepaper here.
A Shift in Organizational Thinking
To succeed in a multi-device world, companies must restructure their product and engineering teams. Instead of organizing teams by device type (iOS, Android, web), businesses should focus on the user journey. Teams should be aligned around solving user problems rather than just delivering software for a specific platform.
Learn more about How Flutter Can Transform Engineering Team Culture in this blog post.
Additionally, companies need to slim down their tech stacks and streamline customer data management. Many organizations collect vast amounts of data but fail to leverage device-specific insights. Incorporating contextual device usage into customer datasets allows businesses to deliver truly personalized experiences.
Rapid Prototyping & Experimentation
Another crucial takeaway from my talk was the importance of rapid prototyping and iterative testing. From VGV’s perspective, organizations should:
- Maintain a hardware feature matrix to document device capabilities and constraints.
- Invest in a concept lab with real-world devices and environments enables businesses to:
- Test across actual devices instead of relying solely on emulators.
- Enhance digital product usability.
- Validate experiences in context to ensure seamless interactions.
- Deploy AI-driven analytics to detect pain points and improve UI/UX based on user behavior.
By adopting these strategies, companies can move beyond static, one-size-fits-all designs and create experiences that adapt dynamically to user needs.
The Future of Digital Engagement
Delivering adaptive, multi-device experiences is more than a technological challenge—it’s a strategic imperative. Businesses that prioritize seamless, integrated digital experiences will not only enhance user satisfaction but also gain a competitive edge in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape.
As I concluded in my talk: “Consumers don’t care about our internal complexities. They just want seamless experiences—anytime, anywhere.”
The question now is: Are you ready to build for a multi-device world? Contact our team to get started!
If you have ideas or feedback about this topic, I’d love to connect with you—feel free to reach out!
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