The Advantages of a Product Management Approach

• Digital product management is a discipline that continually improves a product by evaluating marketplace performance, tracking user feedback and rapidly responding to opportunities and threats.

• By comparison, project management focuses on accomplishing a finite set of tasks to achieve a defined objective.

• Product management continues over the lifecycle of the product – it supersedes any individual project or initiative.

• A product management approach is collaborative by nature and gives stakeholders a high degree of visibility into activities and involvement in decision-making.

Q: Let’s begin with the question you hear often: What’s the difference between product management and project management?

Claire: A project is something with a fixed scope and timeline. A product, in contrast, is something ongoing that evolves based on many different factors within its lifecycle. There’s data coming in from the marketplace – say, user feedback or competitive developments – and that data informs how you will enhance your product.

Q: So, if you’re a product manager, you’re never finished.

Mike: That’s basically true. Whereas a project has a beginning and, ideally, an end.

Q: Can you give us a digital product example?

Claire: Google Maps. It’s in market, performing its function and continually being evaluated. The product manager looks at the analytics, hears input from users, looks at the market and talks to stakeholders at Google to come up with ways to improve it. Google Maps has a roadmap with planned enhancements over the next few quarters. It isn’t a “one-and-done” kind of thing.

Mike: By contrast, adding COVID vaccination sites to Google Maps, that’s a project. For any product, there could be any number of projects underway to add functionality, fix bugs, et cetera.

Claire: Product management takes a sprint-based approach. You’re working against a roadmap, but you’re also leaving open the possibility that something can move up or down the roadmap, based on market feedback. A fixed scope approach, where the scope is defined upfront, doesn’t make sense – it isn’t flexible enough to accommodate frequent re-prioritization and iterative improvements to the product itself.

You’re working against a roadmap, but you’re also leaving open the possibility that something can move up or down the roadmap, based on market feedback.

Q: What if I’m a client and I’m used to defined scope, cost, timeline and so on. Does any of that apply here?

Claire: Managing a product is not open-ended. But it is more fluid. It’s a collaboration
between us and our clients.

Mike: That’s the important thing – being responsive to change, being able to shift priorities. A digital product manager thinks in terms of releases: Release 1 is going to have certain features, because those are the top priority. Release 2 has others, the rest are going to wait until release 3. What those features are might change as you get closer to a release, but you’re looking out in terms of months, maybe years.

Q: You mentioned collaboration earlier.

Claire: Yes. UX, technology, marketing, sales and operations propose things to be included in the roadmap, and in the analysis and prioritization. The product manager needs to balance all of that while ensuring that the proposed features for each release are feasible.

Q: How does that ongoing reevaluation occur?

Mike: This is another useful distinction versus project management. The project manager’s job is to achieve a very crisply defined goal. The product manager, in a way, continually evaluates the activities and proposed solutions to ensure they achieve the desired product objectives: given what we’ve learned from users, from the competition, whatever – do our current milestones and priorities still make sense? If not, how should they change?

Q: So the product manager has a lot more power.

Mike: You hear product managers referred to as the “CEO of the product.” But like any good CEO, she is not a dictator. There is a collection of stakeholders and decision makers who have input into the product. The product manager will have a view and strong voice, but ultimately the decision needs to be collective.

Claire: A product is only successful when there’s a governance structure in place. Let me describe how this works on one client product where VShift essentially acts as product manager: There’s a product owner on the client side who’s part of the digital team. He reports to the head of digital. That product owner listens to the marketplace, focuses on users, and works with the business units and their marketing communications partners to identify potential product enhancements. VShift collaborates with the product owner to sift through the ideas, including our own, and prioritize those based on what helps us reach our long-term goals.

Q: Product managers have been around for a long time. Why does the role seem so much more important now?

Mike: For a long time, businesses thought about digital as a box to check off. They’d say, “We need a new website …,” they’d go build one, problem solved, the website moves into a support phase and the business owner moves onto something else. Problems and opportunities would crop up and accumulate and eventually they’d say, “We need a new website …,” and it starts all over.

The difference now is that we have data on everything. We know what’s happening, what’s working and why things are as they are. That creates opportunities to consider improvements based on facts, not hunches. Digital products go through many, many more releases today, because we have data.

Claire: And because technology advances continually bring new opportunities.

Q: Can we get into the weeds a bit more on digital product management and what exactly it entails.  

Claire: A lot of this is the same as it is for running a project; what is different is that the team is focused on ongoing evolution, not just getting over the finish line. It’s more about what happens when the product launches and having the planning, strategy, resources and tools in place to support the road map.

Q: How does all this benefit our clients?

Claire: Several ways. Clients have greater visibility into the project because they are wrapped into the process and are an active part of the ongoing prioritization/re-prioritization. They understand level of effort and timeframes and can better manage stakeholder expectations on their end. Most important, at any step along the way, they can explain – and if necessary, defend – exactly why certain decisions were made based on data, priorities, et cetera.

Mike: And they can make rapid changes in direction for the reasons we’ve discussed already – the process is designed for agility and flexibility.