Quick Work is Needed — A Transition to Digital Product Management For The Rest of Us

A broad, digital product management focused transformation across all companies and technology teams is finally upon us.

Gartner, a key source in the enterprise world, has made the decree in its latest report “Reinventing Applications as Products for the Digital World”. Although it’s easy to argue those like Marty Cagan had been doing it and began writing about it more than a decade ago.

By 2020, three-quarters of digital business leaders will have pivoted from project to product portfolio management, up from the one-third that have already pivoted today.

By 2020, organizations that have embraced the product model will outperform the competition that has not, in both customer satisfaction and business results.

Why Digital Product Management?

From my standpoint there are three reasons why are these methods are the future.

One, they better connect your team’s technology actions to customer and business outcomes which in the end are what matters most.

Two, these methods are better oriented to things that change quickly. Allowing you to more likely be right by iterating towards an end goal rather than charting a course a year out and putting your head in the sand to deliver it as conceived.

Three, a Digital Product Manager is a hybrid thinker that we all need in our technology team but often don’t have today. Their mindset and background might split ~30% Communication, ~25% Customer, ~25% Business Acumen & ~20% Technical — leaders with this balance can often overcome more obstacles than the traditional technical and financial-minded IT worker.

More from Gartner on the topic…

As organizations deliver more capabilities via digital experiences across multiple touchpoints, the concept of an application is evolving: bringing hybrid portfolios composed of a mix of conventional applications and products, and with agile product management.

Lean IT is the combination of enterprise agile, agile development and DevOps, as required to deliver an end-to-end, product-driven value chain. This value chain comprises teams that deliver a continuous stream of business capabilities, prioritized by product management to deliver the most valuable capabilities first. Such teams often have persistent sources of funding that are provided by the business owner for the product domain.

The Challenge is Speed and Clarity

“2020” was a shorthand term for “the future” since my childhood but… hey… That’s 2 years from now and from what I’ve seen in my time working across industries most companies have a long way to go.

For some of us, we’ve found ways to work this way in pockets for years — but it was seen as an upstart, “innovation team,” or non-standard model that only few were allowed. Even companies in that “partial-product” state will have a lot of work to do. We focused on our part of the work and often ignored the hard parts, we’re challenged to scale now.

This will mean many of the traditionally non-tech companies will be looking to move this way quickly. They’ll be looking for concrete answers and methods but as many of us know there isn’t a one-size fits all answer. There will be confusion, we need to better collect the resources to get ahead of this.

The Key Questions

I recently attended an event with the CEB group with technology leaders from companies big and small discussing the move towards Digital Product approaches. Through discussion we quickly learned the themes and questions held true, the hold-backs and the challenges were very similar.

• How do we better connect the work we are doing to the higher-level goals of the company?
• How will we show the value of our digital knowledge and skills and earn the business trust needed?
• How will our team culture transition from order-taking to setting the direction and delivering?
• How do we need to think about growing or finding digital product management talent?
• How will we unlock decision-making to drive more agility?
• How will we fund and measure our work?
• How will we continue to ensure delivery and quality?
• Will everything work in a singular new “product” method?

Future Posts

Over the next series of post I will try to assemble the best thinking on each of these points to help get unstuck on a digital product transition at my company and hoping it helps others as well.
-Ben

Creative Commons Images Used:
Radio by Royyan Wijaya from the Noun Project
person by Gan Khoon Lay from the Noun Project
growth by UNiCORN from the Noun Project
technical support by Iconika from the Noun Project