What is digital product management and What is the role of a digital product manager?

Digital Product Management - 1

Digital Product Management is the process of managing a digital product to provide a great customer experience. It involves correctly identifying the problem, ideating the solution, defining the key success of the solution and finally delivering to the customer to provide a great customer experience in addition to solid business results.

What does it mean by Digital Product?

A digital product is an entity or service which is using technology to provide value to customers.
Mobile apps like Whatsapp, and Linkedin and Desktop apps like Chrome etc are examples of Digital Products.
These products can be classified into different categories based on their industry, customer type etc.
For example, a digital product which is B2B (Business to Business) will be very different in terms of information architecture, value proposition and other dimensions than a product which is B2C (Business to Customer).
The product manager skills for B2B and B2C can also be very different. B2B product management may require deep technical skills than a B2C Product manager which requires technical skills along with business management.

What does it mean by Product Management?

Product Management is all about maximising business outcomes by solving customer problems with limited resources.
Digital Product management is all about identifying customer problems, and ideating solutions while keeping in mind maximising business outcomes.
People who do the process of Product Management are Product Managers.

What is the role of a digital product manager?

These are the following roles of a digital product manager.

Defining Product Strategy

  • Understanding the customer via doing customer research, customer calling and user testing.
  • Identifying targeted customer segment
  • Identifying customer problems and pain points
  • Doing extensive competitor and market research on different parameters
  • Defining clear goals and positioning the product to provide extensive customer experience and great business value.
  •  Create a high-level product roadmap and clear ask about resource planning.

Defining Product and its interventions

  • Creating the Goal of the product and identifying different value proposition that is clearly linked with the goal of the product
  • Create a minimum viable product (MVP), and identify all the use cases for the MVP with their priority according to impact analysis.
  •  Clearly define the cross-team dependencies for the use cases and have a clear high-level end-state of the product where you want to reach in future.
  • Write clear and crisp (Product requirement Document) PRD with a unit acceptance test, metrics and experiment details.

Collaboration with Design and Development

  • Grooming the PRD (Product Requirement Document) with different stakeholders. .i.e business stakeholders, engineering team, UX team and other PR teams if you want to create buzz for the product.
  • Get the Design ready with your designer. Get it reviewed with the team in design walkthrough sessions
  • Start grooming the PRD with the engineering team, understanding different technical constraints and refine the use cases if you want. 
  • Start raising JIRA tickets for proper tracking and get the commit from the teams
  • Adopt Agile development and involve the development team in the scrum.

Product Rollout & Experimentation

  • Plan for the experiments, go to market strategy in terms of rollout user %.
  • Track the experiments and metrics to go ahead.

Tracking the performance of Product & related Metrics

  • Monitoring the key OKR/metrics and performance of the business metrics
  • Providing input in terms of Promotional activity planning and other go-to-market planning
  • Continue monitoring and getting feedback to get ideas for product improvement.

What are some common Myths about Product Managers?

There are a lot of myths about the product manager in terms of what the product manager does and what the product manager doesn't.  Following are the common myths about the product manager
  • Product managers are real managers and people work under them (Designers/Developers etc). This is not correct, collaboration is the key.
  • Product managers are merely project managers. This is not correct, project management may be some part (let's say 15-20% ) but the bigger task is problem-solving of the customers
  • Product managers are responsible to think of all the ideas. This is not correct
  • Product managers should design cool products. This is not correct as the product manager should develop a product that actually solves users' problem
  • Product managers need a technical background. This is not correct as product managers can be from any background, the only thing required is first-principle thinking.
  • Product managers are the CEO of the product. This is also not correct.

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