Digital product management involves planning, creating, and maintaining digital apps and websites from start to finish. Digital product management is one of the complicated jobs that requires advanced skills. It includes thinking about business goals, designing how things happen and work, and using developed technology to build the product. All this work is done under the leadership of a digital product manager. They decide about the product, like what it should be like, and how it fulfills the people’s requirements, and guide the product teams to build it according to customers’ needs.
Digital product managers have conversations with designers, developers, and other business people to keep everyone on track and working together. The main objective is to build a product that proves beneficial for the people and elevates the business to new heights of success. Digital product managers check if the product is working well or make changes when required. They keep an eye on the customer’s feedback and make efforts to improve the product with time. In this way, the digital product stays helpful and successful in the market.
What are the key aspects of digital product management?
As we mentioned above digital product management means building the product from an idea that leads to success. Here are the main steps:
- Setting the direction: Step number one and the most important step is to decide what the product should do and how to get there.
- Learning from users: Discover customers’ needs, what’s trending, and what other businesses are providing.
- Product design: Work with designers to ensure the product is simple and fun to use.
- Product building: Collaborate with the employees as well as the engineers to design the optimal product and improve it when necessary.
- Release: Control the release so that it is possible for customers to start using the product. Improvement: Ongoing evaluation of how the product is being used, listening to and involving the user community, and enhancing the product. Collaboration: Support marketing, sales, and support so that the product is successful.
All of these steps help to build a digital product that customers like and are high in demand.
The key difference between digital and non-digital product management
One of the main differences between the management of digital and non-digital products is the availability of data. However, managing both types is almost the same. Both digital and non-digital managers need to do the following things:
- Define the product properly.
- Find out the customer demand.
- Properly plan the product’s goals.
- Explain how to sell it effectively.
- Help build quality products.
- Lead sales and marketing efforts.
- Keep the product updated over time.
- Properly manage the Product’s timeline and share updates.
- Always remain the main contact for the product
However, digital product managers have an extra benefit. They get huge amounts of automatic data about how people use the product. This information helps them to make informed and better decisions.
3 basic differences between product managers and digital product managers
As compared to regular product managers, digital product managers have some extra skills. These include:
1. Rapid iteration and deployment
Digital product managers are in a hurry when they’re developing and have to make many small changes and move quickly to updates. This is known as being agile – allowing for new features delivered (which means ‘pushed out’ to their users) regularly as opposed to sustaining long periods. It allows the product to develop gradually based on real user feedback rather than a suite of features that were developed years earlier with assumptions about their needs.
2. Design thinking
Digital product managers build products that are user-friendly and valuable to users. They are working to understand user needs, design clear and simple interfaces and user experiences, as well as iterating on ideas, and testing prototypes to ensure the product feels intuitive, useful, and aligned with user needs and desires. Good design is essential to the success of a product. This is because a powerful digital product can flop if customers find it hard and confusing.
3. Understanding usage data
Digital product managers analyze information about how users use the product, such as user behavior, feature usage, performance, etc., to learn what is (or isn’t) functioning within the product.
They completely go through the data to explore problems and find solutions. Digital product managers provide chances for changes and make informed decisions from actual data instead of hypotheses.
They also regularly check the product post-launch to see that the product is increasing and molding user behaviors in the long term to satisfy user and business requirements.
In summary, digital product managers need to be agile in their development, user-experience-focused, and they need to be data-informed decision-makers. The combination of these factors allows them to create digital products that shine in a fast-changing market.
Top examples of digital product management
Digital product management involves multiple forms of digital products, such as software applications (web, mobile, and SaaS), digital content such as ebooks, music, and online courses, and digital equivalents of physical products such as news media or musical instruments. Others are devices like wifi-enabled thermostats and security cameras that blend hardware with digital services. Online marketplaces and eCommerce sites also fall under this category, as does the management of streaming media and video games. Their management is a continual process of iteration, user research, and prioritizing features to meet changing user requirements and market conditions.
Polish your product management skills with the Oxford Training Centre
Oxford Training Centre provides complete Product Management Training Courses for professionals. These courses are meant to provide the basics to help you understand product development, strategy, and product lifecycle. Our courses cover product ideation, market analysis, agile product management, product pricing strategies, stakeholder engagement, go-to-market planning, and much more.
Delivered by experts with extensive experience, the training is designed to give you the latest tools to implement practically on the job. All product managers, business analysts, or marketers can benefit from product management training courses from the Oxford Centre – and gain a competitive advantage and learning prep for a successful career in product management!