A Guide to Digital Product Strategy and Management

We live in a world that’s run by technology and it’s hard to imagine a time before we had all of the different tools that make our lives easier. Digital products are no longer a thing of the future. Not only are they omnipresent, but their expansion is also immeasurable.

The pandemic has quickened the development of digital tools by as much as seven years and companies that are in the business of creating digital products have a high chance of success. However, it’s not enough to have a good product. You also need an amazing digital product strategy and management.

Work on user documentation

One of the most important parts of digital product development has to be creating a user base. After all, if you want your users to fully understand how your product works, you need to provide them with a guide or a reference point.

This is where user documentation such as knowledge bases comes into play. This documentation provides businesses with a lot of benefits, some of which include:

• Improved customer satisfaction. As much as 70% of consumers like to use a firm’s website to find responses to their problems rather than using emails or phone calls. If you give your clients the option of getting their answers by going through user documentation, satisfaction will increase.
• Better customer experience. When a customer is satisfied with the services you provide, the customer experience will improve as well. If you ensure the customers get all of the information they need through online documentation, they won’t be frustrated or annoyed.
• Increased productivity of your support team. This reference point won’t be of use just for your customers, it will also be an invaluable tool for your support team. When someone contacts them, all they will have to do is search for the right answer and they will be done with the query in no time.

If you’re interested in building a knowledge base, you can take a look at some user guide examples to see how you can create your own user documentation and reap all of the benefits.

Implement organizational change

If you want to learn how to run a successful business and create a great digital product, you’re in for a lot of work. You will have to possess a plethora of product data, get contributions from certain technical disciplines, and integrate with other company departments.

Sometimes, to do this, you need to go through organizational change. This can include things such as:

• Hiring a growth product manager. This is an employee who will focus on business metrics that are relevant for achieving improvement. These managers implement multiple strategies and tactics that allow you to grow your business.
• Work with a data scientist. Since you will have to gather and analyze a lot of data, it will be of immense help if you had a data scientist on your team. An expert will have all the necessary knowledge on effective data gathering and analysis as well as on how to instrument the product.
• Create ProdOps or DevOps teams. In larger organizations, sometimes you need to join multiple teams into one. For example, when you combine the development and operations teams, a code will get released as soon as it’s created and there will be no blame between teams if something goes wrong.

It’s also extremely important to use great tools within your organization. One of the tools that can be of help is the GitLab Jira integration plugin. It provides a secure and easy connection of GitLab reports to Jira, automatically supports all of your GitLab reports in real-time, gives you access to all Jira comments, and much more.

Have all the necessary skills for digital product management

Not everyone can be a good digital product manager. This position requires skills like:

• Thorough research and analysis. A good digital product manager takes the customers’ needs and wants into consideration and they do this by gathering data on what the customers want. You can do this by sending out organization surveys.
• A good understanding of user data. It’s not enough just to collect this data, you also need to know how to use it properly. As a digital product manager, gathering data should come easy to you, but only with a good understanding of this data will you be able to use it to change your product for the better.
• Strategic planning. When there is a lot on your plate, which is often the case for digital product managers, you need to think of your feet and always be able to plan strategically. This means you have to be able to plan long term, always see the bigger picture, and know-how to think outside the box.
• Quick deployment. Customers are extremely demanding and they are always looking for a change, especially when it comes to digital products. You need to follow these wants and demands and deliver functional products to them as frequently as they want them.

Final thoughts

Digital products are in demand now more than ever. If you know how to create the perfect digital product strategy and learn how to be a good manager, you won’t need a lot to succeed. Just remember everything you read about here and keep chasing your dreams.