From Struggle to Strength: Why Digital Organisations Fail at Resilience—and How Product Thinking Can Fix It

Cyber resilience is no longer optional. In today’s digital-first economy, downtime costs businesses an average of $300,000 per hour (ITIC, 2024). That’s not just lost revenue, it’s lost trust, lost customers, and lost competitive edge. For Product Managers, resilience isn’t just an operational concern, it’s a core product capability.

Despite years of cloud adoption and digital transformation, many organisations still falter when disruption hits. Here are the top five reasons why, viewed through a product management lens, and what you can do to turn resilience into a competitive advantage.

1. Complexity Without Clarity

Modern digital environments are a tangled mix of legacy systems, cloud-native apps, microservices, APIs, and third-party integrations. This complexity drives innovation but it also creates chaos during incidents. Without clear dependency mapping, even minor failures can trigger major outages. Think of it like launching a product without understanding the user journey: you’re flying blind.

2. Siloed Teams and Broken Communication

Engineering tracks uptime. Delivery tracks SLAs. Cybersecurity tracks vulnerabilities. Business tracks revenue. But resilience isn’t measured end-to-end and that’s the problem. When disruption hits, misaligned priorities and unclear ownership slow everything down. From a product perspective, it’s like launching features without shared KPIs. Everyone’s busy, but not aligned.

3. Risk in the Blind Spots

Most organisations monitor only 66% of their IT estate (Community Insight Report, 2024). That leaves a third—often cloud workloads, shadow IT, or vendor APIs—completely invisible. Unseen risks include:

• Unowned APIs critical to customer flows
• Shadow SaaS tools handling sensitive data
• Unpatched systems no one knows exist

4. Resilience Is Treated as Optional

Resilience is often seen as insurance, not a feature. But in SaaS and digital platforms, uptime is the product. Customers expect reliability as much as functionality.

Underfunded resilience leads to:

• Incomplete disaster recovery plans
• Ageing infrastructure without failover
• Teams expected to recover without tools

5. Recovery Plans Are Outdated or Unproven

Recovery plans are often static documents, not living products. According to ThinkOn (2024), 7% of organisations never test their DR plans, and most test only once a year.

Without regular iteration:

• Roles are unclear
• Systems behave unpredictably
• Leadership assumes readiness that doesn’t exist
• Treat recovery plans like product features: test, iterate, and adapt.

How to Build Resilience Like a Product Manager

From a product management perspective, the message is clear: resilience is an integral part of the product experience. It isn't insurance; it isn't optional. It's the foundation for customer trust.

To embed resilience into your digital strategy:

• Map dependencies like user journeys
• Rehearse cross-functional responses like sprint rituals
• Invest in full-spectrum observability
• Fund resilience as a product feature
• Test recovery plans regularly

Resilience isn’tjust about bouncing back, it’s about building trust, protecting reputation, and enabling growth. Want to learn how Axiologik helps organisations build resilience and rapid recovery into their digital DNA? Contact us today to start the conversation.