Strategic digital product management: organizing

Few topics are discussed more often in companies than the organization. How to organize people into teams? How to organize functions into departments? Where to allocate responsibilities? The problems of the existing organization. How much better things would be if we did it differently? And so on. This is particularly the case with product management … Read more

Strategic digital product management: Vital Few

The final dimension in this series on digital product management concerns roles and responsibility. Surprisingly, in many traditional organizations, product managers have significant responsibility but surprisingly little authority. Instead, they need to align all the relevant stakeholders and reach decisions based on consensus. Traditionally, this challenge is addressed by building a product management function where … Read more

Strategic digital product management: imaginate

We’ve already talked about exploration as an activity in an earlier post. We need to conduct exploration activities, of course, to find new functionality to add to the existing offerings and to identify new offerings to create. However, exploration is also a mindset and a viewpoint we need to take for the activity to even … Read more

Strategic digital product management: technology

Many, including those in R&D, may view technology as part of the R&D realm and outside the scope of product management. The thinking is that the product manager decides what needs to be built and R&D decides how to build it. In practice, however, the technology choices are so influential on the strategic options available … Read more

Strategic digital product management: stakeholders

After having discussed principles, activities and scopes, we’re now moving on to the different viewpoints product management needs to consider. The coming posts will explore these. Specifically, we’re going to focus on stakeholders, technology and exploration. Stakeholders, as the name implies, are parties that have a stake in whatever is going on. In our context, … Read more

Strategic digital product management: execution

Thomas Edison, the alleged inventor of the light bulb (he wasn’t), famously said that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. The same is true for product management. We can explore and strategize all we want, but if we don’t act on the findings and the strategy, all these efforts are in vain. … Read more

Strategic digital product management: strategy

Few words in corporate lingo are more overused than “strategy.” Frequently, problems in companies are attributed to the lack of a clear strategy. In practice, however, it often is the lack of alignment around the strategy. This tends to lead to a situation where there’s an official strategy in the documents and presentations and another, … Read more

Strategic digital product management: exploration

Product management consists of multiple dimensions and so far, we’ve discussed the underlying principles as well as the scopes. The third dimension concerns the activities of a product manager or the activities conducted as part of product management by anyone in the company. These activities can be structured in many different ways; here, we’ll divide … Read more

Strategic digital product management: ecosystem

Over the last decades, the interest in software ecosystems and business ecosystems has been increasingly strong. Many companies have observed the outsized success of the Apple app store for iPhone and are interested in achieving a similar situation for themselves with a large set of complementors building extensions to one product and having it act … Read more

Strategic digital product management: product

To state the obvious, product management is about managing products. Often, the product manager is described as the CEO of the product, expected to decide on everything that touches it. In practice, things prove to be significantly more complicated and product managers often spend a considerable part of their time on stakeholder management. Previously, we … Read more