What is a Digital Product?
As product managers and product owners, the products we look after are fundamental to our work: they shape our day-to-day activities and determine our responsibilities. We create a product strategy and product roadmap; we manage the product backlog and use minimum viable products and product increments. But what is a product? While this seems to be a trivial question, I have met a surprising number of organisations where people had a wrong or conflicting understanding of what a digital product is. This can cause confusion, lead to unclear roles and responsibilities, and result in applying the wrong product management practices. This post wants to help you reflect on what a product really is and how it differs from features, components, bundles, and the user experience.
Product
What is a product? It might be tempting to say, something we can market or sell. But when it comes to digital products, this definition has only limited applicability. Take the search function on your company’s website. Is that a product? Or is the entire website the product? And how would others, including people from development, marketing, and sales, answer this question?
I view a product as something that creates specific value for a group of people, the customers and users, and to the organisation that develops and provides it. The former is achieved by solving a problem — think of Google Search or Bing that address the challenge of finding information on the Internet — or by providing a benefit — take Facebook that allows people to stay in touch with family and friends.
Creating value for the business is accomplished by directly generating revenue, like Microsoft Office and Adobe Illustrator do, helping sell another product or service, as in the case of iTunes and Google Chrome, or increasing productivity and reducing cost, as in-house developed IT applications do.
Finding a problem that’s worth solving — or a benefit that people would not want to miss once they’ve experienced it — and discovering a viable business model are two key prerequisites for successfully offering a product.
Products go through different life cycle stages: they are created and launched; they develop, grow, mature; and eventually, they die. Some digital products exist for many years and even decades. One of my clients, a company specialised in digital engineering products, offers a products that contains 30 year old code, for instance. This distinguishes products from projects.
Product vs. Project
A project delivers a product release — think of Windows 10 or iOS 9.3 — and it is a temporary endeavour: The project is finished when the new release becomes available. But products have a different life cycle and typically exist for longer. The ancestor of Windows 10, Windows NT, was launched in 1993, and iOS was introduced with the first iPhone in 2007, for example.
Similarly, products have different success criteria compared to projects. A project is successful if the new release is deployed on time and budget, and if it delivers the agreed scope. A product, however, achieves success if it meets it business goals. Revenue-generating products typically become profitable when they have achieved product-market fit and start to grow. This may be months, and in some cases, years after the initial development project was finished.
A product manager’s (or owner’s) job is therefore different from a project manager’s: product people are in it for the long run — assuming that the product prospers and grows.
Read On …
To read the rest of this article and access the remaining tips, please head over to my website: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/what-is-a-digital-product/
Learn More
To learn more about this topic, attend my Product Strategy and Roadmap training course and read my book Agile Product Management with Scrum.
Source: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/what-is-a-digital-product/
