Digital Product Management: The Key to Customer Satisfaction

Over the last decade, we've all witnessed the digital transformation that brought focus to digital products and the expansion of the SaaS industry.

On the one hand, digital technologies and tools have made product management significantly easier. On the other hand, being a digital product manager has never been more challenging than today as you have to balance between innovation, user demands, and business goals.

Not to mention the increased responsibility as every decision can make or break the product’s success.

In this article, we'll cover everything you need to know about digital product management, how it differs from traditional product management, and what skills are necessary for success in this field.

What does digital product management stand for?

To define digital product management, we should first define what digital products are.

A digital product is something you receive electronically, whether it's an ebook, online course or video game.

However, in the context of digital product management, when we say product, we most often refer to online tools and platforms, mobile apps and software as a service (SaaS product management).

Therefore, digital product management stands for managing cross-functional teams consisting of designers, developers and marketers and overseeing all phases of digital product creation, such as:

• Product discovery
• Product ideation
• Product validation and testing
• Digital product development
• Product launch
• Service and support

Skills all digital product managers need to have

To be successful in digital product management, you need a mix of different product management skills, with a special focus on quickly learning new technologies and the ability to adapt.

We'll take a look at the key abilities you need to succeed in a digital product manager role.

Strategic planning

Strategic planning in digital product management involves setting clear, achievable goals for the product that align with the company's overall vision.

It includes developing a detailed roadmap with key milestones and deadlines, effectively allocating resources like budget and human resources and coordinating the work of various teams.

This process also involves anticipating potential risks and challenges and planning ways to address them.

Communication skills

Digital product managers work with a variety of people, including tech teams, marketers, data analysts, designers, salespeople and customer service representatives.

Strong communication skills help them share ideas clearly, collaborate effectively and ensure everyone is on the same page.

Good communication also helps in gathering feedback and making sure the product aligns with the needs of the stakeholders.

Product management skills

Of course, they should be familiar with the basic product management principles such as:

• Building personas: Before developing a product, you should be able to build customer personas based on customer research and product hypotheses. It's essential to figure out what problems they have and how your product can help them solve those problems.
• User story mapping: To do this, you first need to understand the customer journey and then divide it into user stories and transform each story into a task for the development team, making it easier to build a product gradually.
• Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD): This is a unique approach to products and customers based on a deep understanding of their problems and needs. Once you figure out what job a customer is "hiring" your product for, it becomes much easier to build exactly what they need.
• Product management frameworks: You should be familiar with the most popular frameworks such as Opportunity scoring, Value vs Complexity, Benefit vs Cost analysis, etc.

Technical understanding

Digital product managers don't need to have a background in development (although that would be helpful), but they need to understand the technology behind the product in order to be able to communicate effectively with the development team.

They should also be able to explain complex tech details in simple terms to different stakeholders or team members who might not be as tech-oriented. Being tech-savvy also means staying updated on new product management tools that could improve your work.

Agile methodology

Digital product managers must be familiar with the agile methodology that is used in most software companies today, which focuses on flexibility and iterative development. They should be able to break down the product vision into smaller tasks known as user stories.

They have to learn to prioritize small updates efficiently and adjust their plans based on sprint outcomes and stakeholder input. This approach speeds up product releases and allows you to stay flexible and make quick changes when necessary.

To learn more, check out our ultimate guide to the agile product development process.

Design thinking

Design thinking is much more than one of the product management buzzwords as it sometimes gets called. It's a user-centric approach to designing and developing digital products.

As we all know, understanding your customers, their problems, needs and desires is necessary for creating a successful digital product.

Here's how digital product managers can implement design thinking in five steps:

• Empathize with the users
• Define their needs
• Brainstorm and generate ideas
• Create a quick prototype
• Test your product

And when you're done? Rinse and repeat. The goal is not to succeed on the first try, but to learn and make improvements and adjustments until you're sure that your product fully meets users' needs.

Prioritization

Digital product managers have to become masters of prioritization and decision-making as we're always dealing with limited resources, whether it's time, budget or human resources.

They have to prioritize features and tasks based on business impact, user value, and feasibility, as well as find a solution that satisfies all stakeholders.

When it comes to feature prioritization, here are some of the frameworks you should know:

• MoSCoW
• RICE scoring
• Kano model
• Impact/Effort matrix

Analytics skills

One of the biggest advantages that digital managers have over product managers who oversee physical products is the ability to track how people use their products in real time. There's a lot of data that can help you improve your products and increase customer satisfaction.

However, to do all that, a digital product manager should be able to find relevant data, analyze it, and draw some conclusions. This includes understanding how to use different tools and methodologies to analyze user behavior, market trends and product performance. They should also be able to translate complex data sets into actionable insights for product teams.

Creativity and critical thinking

Creativity is essential for coming up with new ideas and solutions, while critical thinking helps you refine and improve those ideas. These skills help you shape a product’s strategy and vision, ensuring it meets user needs and stands out from the competition.

Business skills

A digital product manager should have a bit of entrepreneurial spirit that gives them a broad view of the market and the ability to identify opportunities.

They also have to understand business fundamentals, including revenue models, pricing strategies and financial metrics. This knowledge allows them to make informed decisions that drive profitability and market success.

Non-digital vs digital product management

Digital product management is quite different from managing physical or non-digital products.

While physical products like gadgets or clothing require handling materials, manufacturing and logistics, digital products, such as apps or software, focus on coding, user experience and updates.

Here are the main differences:

• The length of development cycles: Naturally, the development of non-digital products often involves longer development cycles, as products have to be manufactured and physically distributed to the customers. On the other hand, digital product management has rapid development cycles, often based on the agile methodology.
• Iterations: It's much easier, faster and cheaper to add changes and enhancements to your existing products if they're digital and don't require manufacturing. Updating non-digital products can be costly and time-consuming, and that's why it's done less frequently.
• Availability of data: Unlike physical products, digital products generate a lot of data that can be analyzed in real time and used to enhance the product. Digital product managers rely heavily on product analytics, A/B testing and user feedback to iteratively improve the product. In non-digital product management, feedback loops are much slower as you have to wait for the results of surveys, sales data, etc.
• Supply chain and logistics: Finally, this is what makes digital product management much easier than traditional management because it's one less thing to think of. Managing non-digital products requires taking care of logistics, inventory management and distribution channels. It also requires collaborating with suppliers, manufacturers and retailers to bring your product to the market. This is not to say that you don't have to care about the distribution of your digital products, but it's definitely much easier, and you can cut the middleman if you're a startup with limited resources.

How can Zeda.io help product managers

Zeda.io is an AI product management platform that should become the best friend of every product manager as it helps you streamline your work and automate some processes that you'd be doing manually.

Here are its main features:

• Centralized feedback: With Zeda.io, you can automate collecting, organizing and analyzing customer feedback. You no longer have to switch from one app to another or use spreadsheets, as we allow you to centralize the feedback from over 5,000 apps. Our platform will organize and analyze the feedback for you, including sentiment analysis, tagging, etc.
• AI insights: Our platform transforms customer signals into actionable data-driven insights suggesting you ways to improve your existing product or build a new one.
• Product validation: You can validate your ideas and find market opportunities 10 times faster than doing it manually, saving you both time and money. If you have any questions or doubts about your new product, just use our Ask AI tool to get answers based on customer data.
• Product roadmaps: Why build your product roadmap from scratch when we have dozens of customizable templates that have been tested over and over again? Our roadmaps are revenue-oriented and have built-in feature prioritization frameworks helping you decide what to build first.

These are just some of its numerous features, so we suggest you try it out for free and discover why digital product managers use Zeda.io daily.

Conclusion

Digital product managers have a lot on their plate, but the good news is that there are plenty of tools to help them. Zeda.io is an AI-powered platform that can help you validate your product ideas and build actionable product roadmaps.

It can also analyze large volumes of customer feedback for you, summarize it and provide you with insights that allow you to build products your customers actually want. With Zeda.io as your assistant, you can save so much time and focus on important things like product strategy and long-term planning.

Sign up today and try it out for free.