What do digital product managers do, and why do you need one?

24th April 2020

An overview of what a digital product manager does, and how a digital product manager can help your business to grow and succeed.

Reading time: 5 minutes

Next week: The truth about large corporate websites

What is a digital product manager?

There is no single career path to becoming a digital product manager, a role which blends 3 skillsets into one; business, customers & technology.

When you meet one, they might have started as a web developer writing lines of code, or perhaps they were on the front-line in a call centre understanding what makes customers tick, or maybe have a history in business development encouraging financial growth. What you'll find they have in common is a desire to question everything, a love of solving problems and an ability to cut through noise to discover the best ways forward.

A digital product manager is there to help you discover new opportunities in the online world, and to deliver change in the right way so that you can make the most of them.

Going back to the three key skillsets, a good digital product manager will be able to turn their hand to all of them, and will know when to dial each one up or down depending on the situation. Here are three very real scenarios where your business could harness the skills of a product manager. These are real-world examples that I've picked from working in the digital industry for over 20 years, and are all projects or products that I was involved in as either a digital product manager or product owner:

Trying a new technology

A digital marketing company identified a new opportunity after seeing some technology that we hadn't harnessed before. How did we give it a go? How did we reduce investment risk?

I helped this business to quickly test, launch and scale a messaging/chat service over a 9 month period. The teams used a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach which means we launched an imperfect bare-bones service first, quickly gathered user feedback, and iterated the next versions making small improvements rapidly until we knew we had built something that would work. This was then launched at a much bigger scale. Using this approach, we reduced the risk of investment by taking small steps instead of going straight to a "big bang" launch and took time to learn what our users needed so we knew we'd be building it in the right way for them.

Pivoting with your customers

During a pilot launch of a new smart home platform, this large mobile operator saw a dip in customer interest. How did we address it? What did the team do to change the situation?

A key element of a product manager's role is to represent the voice of the customer. In this situation, I looked at as many data points I could, tried to identify patterns in customer behaviour from survey results, and spent time speaking face-to-face with real users and potential customers. In return, this made us realise that we had been positioning the products in the wrong way by focussing on the technology itself and not directly addressing the customer needs and problems that our offering helped to solve. We made a change in the proposition that resulted in re-gaining some interest from our target customers.

Vision & business strategy

Whilst working at one of the UK's largest energy suppliers, huge changes in legislation impacted how products could be marketed and sold online. How did we react? What strategy dealt with uncertainty?

I worked very closely with product marketing, energy pricing and legal teams to fully understand how we could re-build the product portfolio and ensure that our website teams built a new online sales journey that met the new requirements but also didn't confuse users. The strategy we took was to constantly monitor how other suppliers were reacting, make changes as late as possible so we could understand what others had done, and keep posing questions to the regulator about what we could/couldn't do online. Sometimes, the best strategy is not to be first at something, but learn from how others do things before moving.

These are examples of product managers reacting to specific events using the three key skillsets, but in a 'business as usual' world a product manager will also be able to improve overall performance. If you have a team of people doing 'stuff' on your website, do you just feed them the changes you need, or do you somehow try work out what 'stuff' is worth doing first? How do you know that the budget for your web team is being spent in the best way? Do you have specific objectives for your online business, and do you know how to get your online team to hit those objectives? These are all things that a digital product manager can do for you.

That's great, but why does my business need a digital product manager?

I'll be honest, no-one said digital product managers were essential. You can probably run a business quite successfully without one thanks very much, and do well from it. But think about some of the most successful technology products of the last 20 years:

iPhone. There were touchscreens before it. People used smart phones before it.
Netflix. There were videos on the internet before it. People rented films before it.
Tesla. There were electric cars before it. People drove cars before it.

These aren't all pure-play online businesses, and they aren't all purely digital products, but they are all technology products where the business/customer/technology blend is exactly right. There's no doubt that their success can be attributed to incredible product management, and that is the difference that good digital product management and good digital product people can make to a business.

It's likely that if you're reading this, you're probably not working at Apple, Netflix or Tesla - but you might own a small business with a website, or work for a company where the website IS the business, and be trying to work out how to manage or accelerate growth, trial a new online product, or sell in a different way. A digital product manager can help you do all of these things in the right way to give you the best chance of success with your opportunities.

Becoming a product-led business will mean that you will become more value-focussed, you'll use technology in your business much more effectively, your teams and individuals involved in the online side of business will perform better and your customer propositions will be much more aligned to what customers actually need. This is true at any scale, and true whether you pay an agency to run and maintain your website for you (do they just do exactly what you ask them to do, or do they push back and suggest completely different ways to reach your goals?) or whether you have an in-house team that run things for you (are they always working on the right things first?).

You don't have to suddenly hire a digital product management team (although this is possible), or find your own digital product manager to bring in-house. If a product-led approach to running your business or website interests you, as a first step, I'd suggest reading a few really good books on the subject which I'm happy to recommend.

Sounds good? Do get in touch even if it's just for a chat to find out more. Abingdon Digital can offer digital product management services on a consultancy, part-time or full-time contract basis and would be happy to be a part of helping your business to grow in the digital world.

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