Digital product owner jobs

Customers in the modern day engage with businesses on a daily basis through a variety of different digital media. Your ability to create a consistent and enjoyable experience across all of your customer touchpoints is critical to your success. But as the complexity of these digital experiences grows, so does the need for a specific function to oversee that experience. Step forward, the proprietor of the digital product.

A digital product owner (DPO), sometimes known as a digital owner, is the one who is responsible for managing all aspects of the digital experience provided by your organization. They strive to simplify internal procedures for your team, manage the tools necessary to accomplish these processes, and ensure that users have a uniform experience when engaging with your firm online. They do this by ensuring that users have access to the same tools.

As your organization expands, the management of the many interdependent processes and individuals who have an effect on the digital experience is only going to get more difficult. Their objective is to synchronize the digital strategy of your team with the objectives of your company.

When working across different teams in this manner, digital owners have many of the same duties as product managers; however, they place a greater emphasis on a particular facet of the interaction that users have with your product. They ensure that users and your team are provided with what they need at each and every stage of the process.

1. Your Technology Stack Should Be Managed by Digital Product Owners

The only way to successfully create a digital experience is to ensure that all of the tools used by your team are compatible with one another. Modern product teams employ an enormous amount of technology on a daily basis, from front-end web services to data warehouses to continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines. This implies that there is the possibility for individual points of failure at any level.

A good DPO knows how all of your products connect with one another and leverages that understanding to make the process of communicating with your technology stack as streamlined as it can possibly be.

Whenever the members of your team are tasked with developing a new feature or building a new product, your DPO offers insightful guidance on the technology that is necessary to bring projects to a successful conclusion. This not only makes it simpler to design a clear product development strategy, but it also reduces the total amount of effort that is necessary to get it done. Your team is able to begin active development as fast as is humanly feasible since they do not have to spend their time researching the most effective tools that they can employ.

Additionally, the owner of your digital product will do frequent reviews of this technological stack in order to discover areas that might benefit from enhancements. If a certain tool can't be properly integrated into your stack anymore, or if the price to do so becomes exorbitant, digital owners will look for and evaluate other tools.

The in-depth understanding of your technology stack that you possess is essential to the process of developing better programming environments for your team.

2. The owners of digital products work to get an understanding of user behavior.

The foundation of every effective product strategy is a comprehensive comprehension of the requirements and actions of the target audience. When developing a new feature or product, your team must consider the requirements of the target audience in order to produce something that the customers will find really beneficial. Digital product owners are responsible for sharing consumer insights with product managers and working together to ensure that your team addresses a genuine user issue while also having an effect on the organization's overall objectives.

They then utilize this data to design experiments that test and confirm their insights, which they use the tools and technology they manage to do. Digital owners use these tools and technology to delve into consumer data and pull out common qualities and behaviors of customers.

Experiments like this help your team construct user personas that are more realistic, which you can then use to target potential customers who have characteristics that are similar to those of your existing clients. Let's imagine you've seen a decline in the number of people engaging with the email automation function of your product. Your digital owner would compare the consumers who are still using the product to those who are not using the function in order to find the fundamental distinctions that exist between the two groups. After that, they may make use of that information by designing an experiment with the goal of improving the overall experience of using that tool.

The owners of digital products may then target consumers who have had problems with the tool in the past by using customer data to do so. They can inform these users that the tool has been upgraded with additional capabilities, such as

by either including a link to the email automation system in the primary navigation or

reducing the amount of complexity involved in adding fresh emails to a campaign.

When conducting these sorts of testing, it is necessary to have an in-depth knowledge of each digital contact point that a consumer encounters when using the application. Therefore, before to getting started, the digital owner would need to collaborate with the other members of the team in order to get as much knowledge as they possibly can.

3. Owners of digital products are responsible for providing support for several functions

To create a digital experience that is seamless involves input from various points of contact across different departments; thus, digital owners need to collaborate with a large number of individuals who have varied degrees of seniority. The digital product owners are responsible for facilitating the procedures that are carried out across various teams and acting as the information channel between each member. Every member of the team is able to concentrate more easily on their day-to-day obligations as a result of the availability of this assistance.

Because digital owners interact with such a wide variety of individuals on a regular basis, they are used to having conversations with engineers, marketing, product teams, and leadership. They are able to better frame critical findings for each particular group whenever they need to convey significant insights since this degree of familiarity enables them do so.

Leadership teams, for instance, would need to see the overall business impact of a specific project, whereas marketing teams would want to understand the value add for customers and how to create messaging around it. Both sets of teams, however, would need to see the overall business impact of a given project. Your digital owner becomes an essential cog in the wheel of your internal feedback loop if they are able to supply this information depending on the audience to whom they are catering.

DPOs are well-versed in the art of establishing communication that is crystal clear and simple to comprehend across and within teams because of their role as the conduit for critical information. They take an active approach to documenting dialogues and working toward increasing visibility into every facet of the project. They are one of the most important points of contact for your team, and they work in conjunction with product managers.

4. Digital Product Owners are Responsible for Managing the Workflow of the Team

Together with product managers and their teams, digital product owners are responsible for prioritizing the work that must be done to finish any project. They are able to readily transform such insights into actionable tasks for the team because they have a comprehensive understanding of the requirements for developing successful goods based on a profound familiarity with the demands of customers. In addition to this, they do all of this while retaining an overall perspective on the product's vision and strategy.

In spite of the fact that the approach for managing these projects will be dependent on the particular tools and methods you utilize, digital owners may assist in the creation of distinct jobs and pipelines for your team to follow.

Using the Scrum/Agile method, the team in this example from Trello creates a clear sense of the work that is required, the work that has been completed, and the work that still needs to be done. Each of these aspects of the work is connected to a particular objective that has been defined for the project and your team.

The team will have the visibility they need in order to move ahead together after it has been determined how particular activities may be aligned with the larger product and business objectives. And because of this common direction, useful context is created, which can then be used to construct goods in a quicker and more effective manner.

The best digital product owners accomplish all of this while still keeping a 10,000-foot vision of each project that they are working on. Because of this, they are better able to modify priorities as projects go forward and proactively identify and fix possible bottlenecks before they have an influence on your release timeline. They are familiar with your team's release management strategy and make use of it to reduce the possibility of overlap or interdependence among the members of your group.

5. The owners of the digital products track the progress of the team

The process of bringing a concept for a product all the way through to its commercialization is one that is drawn out and difficult. Together with the product managers, digital product owners are responsible for monitoring the team's overall development and providing updates to the group. They can assess themselves against a well-defined set of goals and key outcomes (OKRs), and they have a strong understanding of how each step of the product development process contributes to the overall goal of delivering a digital experience that is successful.

These OKRs are defined by digital owners at the beginning of any project that will have an effect on the digital experience, and they concentrate on how impending product or feature upgrades will have an effect on the numerous contact points along the journey.

The owner of your digital product should communicate these OKRs to the rest of the team and provide updates on their status as the project moves forward. By doing so, continuous insight into the product vision and strategy can be maintained, and everyone can continue to go in the same direction. In addition, enhanced visibility makes it simpler for your employees to carry out their individual responsibilities while retaining their sense of assurance. Your team will be better able to hold themselves responsible for their work and their level of engagement with the project as a whole will increase as a result.

This clarity guarantees that each new feature update or product release is in accordance with what your consumers anticipate from your digital experience. While digital owners focus completely on the online customer journey, this clarity assures that they are meeting their expectations. In a nutshell, they check to see if everything you do improves the situation without having a detrimental effect on the way customers see your product and make judgments about it.

One of the Most Important Members of Your Staff Is the Digital Product Owner

When a significant portion of the customer experience is built on top of digital goods, having a person who is solely responsible for managing that experience is quite critical. Users will have a much better and more meaningful experience with your website if you have digital product owners on your team. This will also make it much simpler for your team to accomplish the objectives they have set for themselves.

Define a digital product owner the next time you are planning a release that will have an effect on the online experience. This person will collaborate with your product managers and the rest of your team to ensure that each release will have a genuine and good influence.