Podcast Summary

The podcast discusses the role of a digital product manager, highlighting the key differences between traditional product management and digital product management. The interviewee explains the responsibilities of a digital product manager, including managing a portfolio of digital products, understanding customer needs, leveraging data and analytics, and effectively managing stakeholders and development teams.

 

Transcripts

Transcripts are auto-generated.

Announcer (00:01):
You are listening to the Cambridge Marketing Podcast, and this time it's all about digital product management.

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (00:07):
What great digital product managements are really good at insight. So they're really good at being able to sit and look at the data and choose which data streams are important to be able to drag out insight rather than just numbers.

Announcer (00:21):
From Cambridge Marketing College, this is the Cambridge Marketing Podcast.

Kiran Kapur (host) (00:25):
Hello and welcome. This week we are discussing digital product management and I'm delighted to welcome back Richard Kendrick MD of Arboreal Marketing, definite friend of the podcast you've been on several times before, and also tutor for the digital product manager, apprenticeship for the college. So Richard, welcome back. Could we just start with a really basic thing about what is the product manager?

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (00:50):
So a product manager, it will be a function within sometimes category departments or product departments in an organisation and they will manage a portfolio of products and that could be anything from a range of cereal through to toolkits, all the way through to digital products such as HubSpot, et cetera. Their role is basically to take new products into the range where there are gaps to look at what customers are demanding within the market, but then also to manage things like pricing, adding new products or obsoleting old products and making sure that the stock levels for physical products, et cetera are all available when they need to be.

Kiran Kapur (host) (01:32):
So I'm getting the impression, quite a big role, quite a wide role,

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (01:36):
Really, really broad role. Great product managers have skill sets that involve being able to handle things like distribution and supply networks. They'll probably have a range of different suppliers on lots of different levels. So if you imagine if you are a product manager within a car company, you haven't just got the car itself, you've got the engine mounts, you've got the bearing suppliers, you've got the people who supply the metal fabrication for the boot, and then you've also got the people who know how to programme the radio and the DAB and all rest of it. So that is a really wide skillset of being able to manage those people. And at the same time you have to have great commercial knowledge around profit margins. You need to be able to forecast sales revenue and you need to do that across a whole portfolio of different levels of products. You need to understand brand positioning and things like that. So really, really broad range.

Kiran Kapur (host) (02:28):
We're specifically looking at digital product managers. So we're looking at digital products. So can you give me some examples of what those are?

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (02:37):
So whereas a traditional or your standard product manager will be managing, in my example, like a car, you've got a physical setup there where you have probably got multiple manufacturers around the world who are bringing in different parts into one factory where that is then assembled into the final product and then that might then be onto a dealership who then sell onto an end user. That is a very fixed chain, whereas with digital product management, what you're looking at is something that is usually online. So think something like Excel or Slack or HubSpot, one of those platforms that use within the cloud, it has been built by a team of coding people usually or technical specialists who then build the digital product and you sell it and there's no actual physical transaction other than money lands in an account. And you can do that on a subscription or you can do it on a yearly basis. Often it's on a retainer and whereas in product management you will be looking at any changes within a physical product, have to go through very set procedures where you are going to end up talking to the supply network, they're going to have to go and do quality testing, et cetera, et cetera. With digital product management, it's much more rapid. So you get that feedback almost immediately from the customer and you can make changes or technological updates almost immediately to the platform. It's a much more immediate process than a physical one.

Kiran Kapur (host) (04:02):
And is there also a speed of getting things to marketplace, therefore?

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (04:07):
Well, it depends on the complexity of the product range really. If you are putting in something into the marketplace that is on a standard platform or uses someone else's platform, so if you are adding in an addition rather than building a whole new app, say it's a plugin for Chrome or it's a plugin for HubSpot, that can be very rapid. You make a very small product, you work with the people you are plugging it into and you have a dependent product strategy. So you put that product in place and it can be very, very quick. And those are really immediate moments where you are identifying what the consumer wants very quickly you find a gap in the market, you invent that thing and you build it in a very short space of time. If you are building a HubSpot, so a CRM system from the ground up, then that can be a long process, but actually you can launch at a very early part of the process. You can launch what's called an MVP, a minimal viable proposition. You put that out into the marketplace and from there you can then start iterating afterwards where you're just adding developments very quickly, but you've got a core base of early adopters already using the platform as soon as they're available. So actually that can be a much more immediate launch rather than waiting for something to be delivered and then launch it, you can deliver it at a basic stage and then just keep developing afterwards.

Kiran Kapur (host) (05:29):
Okay. So you used a couple of bits of jargon in there. One was the dependent product strategy. So what's a dependent product strategy?

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (05:36):
Well, so there are lots of different types of product strategy, but a dependent product strategy is something like a watch strap for a watch. So you cannot have the watch strap unless the watch exists. And so a dependent product strategy is basically where you are designing things. Think with something like the iPod headphones, you've got the case that you put the headphones into whoever manufactures those is working on a dependent product strategy.

Kiran Kapur (host) (06:03):
Brilliant. And the other one you said was minimum viable proposition,

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (06:06):
Right. So that's at the point where you have something called a product roadmap, and this is where you take the customer's expectations and needs. You find your key target segments, you put them at the heart of everything you're building for this particular product you want to develop, and then you create a roadmap of all the things you are going to deliver to make that digital product up until the point you're ready to launch. But the launch might not be the complete finished product because to do that could take years, but you want to launch within six months say. So you'll draw a line that says from the basic absolute customer must have this to use our software, we will launch at that point and that's your MVP and then afterwards all the things that are nice to have or icing on the cake, you keep adding those on afterwards, but you've got the core basic product launched in one place.

(06:57):
So an MVP is an early launch really it's not quite a soft launch, but it's certainly not the completed product. And in fact, one of the big differences between physical product management, digital product management is the completed product may never happen in digital product management because technology changes. So if we look at something like HubSpot or Slack, you see that now AI integration is very important. So AI developments now being rolled out across a number of big platforms, which means that we are no longer in a position where you end up with a finalised product, you've always got something that is evolving. It's an evolution rather than a complete redevelopment.

Kiran Kapur (host) (07:37):
And is that something you also see in physical product or is it a specific characteristic of digital?

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (07:43):
I think it's a very specific characteristic of digital. I think that because everything is so easy to update, you are always working with code rather than with a physical manifestation of something where you might have a difference in traditional product management. If you think like a Tesla, Teslas can be updated overnight with a new firmware upgrade where you're actually, if you think of that's a hybrid situation where you have lots of digital elements to a physical product. So overnight it can be updated and to the point where the entire car can drive differently the next day because you've done a software upgrade rather than a hardware upgrade. So there is a blurring of the lines, but generally speaking it's very specific to digital product management management.

Kiran Kapur (host) (08:26):
So if I was to come to a sort of specific or a more specific digital product, so I was thinking about probably a lot of us were thinking something like an app. I was using the Met office app this morning to try and work out what the weather was going to be like and whether my onions were going to be okay in the garden. So there is an app based there, so that's a digital product, it does what I need it to do because it tells me that there is where I happen to be and it allows me to set in a location. How would you then think about developing that or extending that? How do you know that it's ready to go, that it's okay to launch with it ?When the minimum viable product actually is?

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (09:10):
So if you are working in a customer-centric way that at the beginning of the project you'll have done an awful lot of work to define what customer needs are. So you'll have taken the key target segment that you're aiming that app towards and you will say, right, what are the basic things that these people need this app to do? And then on top of that you'll start saying, right, well you have something called user stories. And a user story would be I want to be able to do X and Y happen. So in your case, I want to be able to download the app and look at my location and find what the weather's going to be like this week so I can grow my onions. So you've got a, if this, then that logical setup, you build that right at the beginning into your product management focus when you're building the product and then that becomes your core thing.

(10:01):
So those are your deliverables that you manage the whole way and your roadmap gets you from A to B. So you start by saying right at this point we don't have an app, we have a bunch of meteorological information we are gathering, we've probably got that in a separate system. So the first thing we need to do is start building the app environment, which will then look a certain way and have a certain interface because that's what our customers need. And then we need to build an integration into our current meteorological information so that we can start pulling that data across into the app in a real time situation so everyone knows how to grow their own. And once you know that you've got an interface that people agree with, you've got a way of downloading it holds customers data in a secure fashion. So you're not going to lose that or abuse it in any way and you can pull the information you need from your background systems.

(10:50):
You've then got yourself an app that can be launched in an MVP situation. Now the next development on that might be that you can do a long-term forecast or you can set in parameters based on your own login so you can start logging in and doing things. Those might be future parameters, but from an MVP point of view, you need the weather to show accurately. You need the user to be able to use the app accurately and you need to be able to download it in a secure and safe fashion. So that would be your MVP deliverables, your milestones.

Kiran Kapur (host) (11:22):
So you other use a case might be, actually I can't go outside and grow onions, I've got horrible hay fever and if the pollen counts particularly high, I don't want to go anywhere near my garden. So that would be a different type of user journey or use case?

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (11:36):
And it might be that you leave pollen count at the MVP, but you put pollen count in six months later because by that point you've got lots of user information. You can see you've fixed your bugs. One of the things about digital product management that differs from traditional quite dramatically is backlogs. So you are always building a backlog of gremlin's bugs and difficulties that struggle points that people are having within the app or within the system. And you can then start working through those and eliminating them. Whereas with if you are managing, you've designed a new spanner, that spanner is now fixed in that way and you kind of have to get rid of all of your stock before you can go back to the supplier and go, well actually that needs to be four inches shorter or it needs to be more ergonomic or whatever.

(12:22):
That's difficult proposition with a digital product, you can put that live and then measure everybody. It's all so measurable because the data you can collect in the background, you can then start saying, well actually people struggle when they get to this point of the app. When they log in and they see the weather, they're not seeing the weather perfectly, it's within 10 miles of them rather than within 10 metres. Let's see if we can fix that. So that would go on the backlog. So you work through your backlog and then once you've cleared off all of those major gremlins, you can then move on to what's the next development, which might be pollen count. So okay, we can now put in this nice extra feature that will keep people, make them what we tend to see as being sticky on the app. So they keep coming back, they keep using your app rather than finding someone else's app. So the more user-friendly you make it, the easier you make it, the more you keep close to that customer and you keep customer-centric to their core needs, the more likely you are to keep them using the product and not going off to your competition.

Kiran Kapur (host) (13:21):
So what I'm hearing here is a lot about the customer and you've really got to understand what your customer is looking for. So those use cases are really important .

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (13:31):
Yeah, and I don't think that's any different across any type of product management to be honest. It's just more immediate with digital product management. So you are collecting vast amounts of data, even if it's something as simple as a website. So if a website does fall into digital product management because it's digital and if you are a website builder, you need to be aware of how designs are changing over time and things like how the Google algorithm interacts with the page so that you can get the best SEO result for your client. You can collect all of that in GA four. So all of that information is in Google Analytics to be able to map how people are using websites to then be able to design websites better. So I think because there's so much information, it's easier to be customer centric when you're managing portfolios digitally than when you're doing it physically.

Kiran Kapur (host) (14:21):
So there's less getting customers together physically to see how they actually use the spanner in a real life situation because you can genuinely see how they're using it in a real life situation because it's a digital product,

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (14:35):
So there's a couple of, you can measure all the metrics and analytics from how people are using that product, but also it's much easier to reach out to people while they're using the product. So you can set up feedback forms or you can have a very quick net promoter score rating to say likely are you recommending it? If you notice when you use an app for a certain length of time off iStore off Android, you'll see that you usually get a little box that pops up saying, would you like to rate this app and give a review and you can start collecting those reviews really easily. If people do leave a review, it's usually because they want some sort of feedback themselves. So then you start a conversation with those people and you start getting a two-way feedback going where you can start saying, right, well these people can't do this thing they really want to do on the app, so we're going to actually fix that for them now. And then once we fixed it, we go back to them and say, is this what you meant? And so there's a constant feedback loop going which you don't get in other product management route because you actually have to have a focus group together of people physically where you send them things physically and they have to physically give up time to do it so much more immediate and there is so much more data digitally that it's much easier to be customer centric.

Kiran Kapur (host) (15:48):
One of the things I've got to come onto is the sort of skills that a digital product manager needs. So clearly one thing is that they can't be frightened of data because data is going to be quite key.

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (15:57):
And I think there has to be a really good marriage of skills between being able to understand the customer and that doesn't necessarily mean being great at data, although it's a big part of that. It means having that understanding of being able to put yourself in the customer's shoes and also reach out to them to get actual feedback to then say, right, if we are going to use this app, do I like this app? Does this app work for me? Am I a typical customer in this situation? And map that out and then be able to compare that to the data. One of the things about working digitally is there is vast amounts of data, so it's very easy to get analysis paralysis and just sort of look at and get bogged down and just numbers and numbers and numbers. So what great digital product managements are really good at insight.

(16:46):
So they're really good at being able to sit and look at the data and choose which data streams are important to be able to drag out insight rather than just numbers. So I think they have to be able to understand that which is more than being good with data that's about understanding the customer and what the data's telling them. And then on top of that, they need to be great at managing stakeholders because most digital product managers won't build the app themselves. They will have a team of coders who will go and do that. So there is a particular personality type with them. You have to be able to really interact with them well. You have to be able to communicate to them what the goal is and to make sure that there aren't things like scope creep. So your project scope is basically what is this project going to do?

(17:39):
What do we have the money to cover and what we have the money to cover. So in your weather app, we have the money to cover showing people weather for now and the next week we don't have the money to be able to implement pollen count right now or the weather for the entire month. If we have people coming in and we don't manage that very well, we'll have lots of people going on, we need to add that, we have to add it. There's lots of pressure internally from lots of different departments saying, well, we need this, we need that and this has got to be cheaper, but we can't. We also need to put that in. And suddenly you have scope creep, which means lots of things that weren't in the plan are now in the plan. So the project takes longer, it costs more money, it doesn't meet customer needs, and often failure can be attributed to just scope being blown out of the water. So a great product manager also needs the skills to be able to understand the scope, set it, get everyone to buy into that scope and then manage people so that they don't keep adding things in and going on full scope creep. And I think that stakeholder management, it's really, really important.

Kiran Kapur (host) (18:42):
So who are the stakeholders? So you've already mentioned we've got the coders, we've got presumably some finance because you'll always be dealing with finance. You've mentioned that you've got to be able to manage and you've got to be firm enough to say, no, no, no, this is out of scope. You can't just add this in because it is a senior manager's pet interest that they want to drop into something.

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (19:11):
So you've got your Board, which obviously you're always your biggest stakeholders and you need to keep 'em sweet and you'll have your CFO, but then often, particularly with scope creep, the biggest threat is Sales because they get awfully excited that they might be able to sell your particular app to a customer. Even if it does nine things out of 10, usually a salesperson will go, "oh yeah, no, definitely does the 10th thing" and suddenly that's now on your scope list that it wasn't before. And if every salesperson does that, you've now got 20 things instead of two. So managing the sales team's enthusiasm actually and managing expectations is usually pretty important though you might have other product portfolios that this particular product interacts with, so you have to make sure that the entire category interacts with each other well and everyone's on the same page.

(20:02):
So all of those things are, I think outside of that you just have to make sure that things like your support team, your sales and service team, so once the app's out there or once the website's launched or whatever the digital thing is, you are going to have to have someone on hand either on a live chat or something similar where if something goes wrong, they can triage what went wrong and help the customer and make sure they always feel like they've got support. So you have to keep that customer support really sharp and keep them in the loop, tell 'em what developments are there, how long those developments are going to be before they land, particularly for products already live. So managing that, those expectations are really important as well.

Kiran Kapur (host) (20:43):
So that's your internal stakeholders. Other than customers, are there external stakeholders you have to manage?

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (20:49):
You'll have your agencies. So not everything is built internally. So you'll then have your agencies that you need to manage. And again, that's down to scope and they'll be trying to manage you as much as you're managing them. So quite often you'll be trying to get more out of them then not that they've promised, but that they want to spend money on you for. And finding those agencies and making sure they're the right fit for you and for the product you're trying to build are really important. So a lot of businesses want to add an app to increase their sales channels and just to make things a bit easier for customers, which means they haven't got those skills internally. So they're going to an external app building company. If you're a small company with a small budget, you go to a really big app company, are you going to get the best people you could have got to build your product or are you going to get the small team because everyone else is looking after their bigger clients? Are they going to have to scope for you? So you have to make sure that that marriage of agencies is right before signing them up. And then again, set the scope between you, set the expectations and manage that going forward. So if there are changes down the line, expect that they're going to ask for more money for those changes. But similarly, if they're not delivering what they said they were going to deliver, you need to be strong with them. So yeah, agencies is usually the biggest sort of connected stakeholder other than customers.

Kiran Kapur (host) (22:07):
It's really interesting. So I'm getting a real sense of the management side and the ability to communicate, the ability to understand, the ability to just manage as in managing agency relationships, but managing the budgeting side and everything else is clearly the key part to this role.

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (22:26):
I think this is very much about, you don't necessarily need to be the expert in every single area, but you need to be the expert on what you are delivering. And so always having the customer at the heart of that understanding your roadmap from beginning to end, sticking to the scope and making sure there's no scope creep. I think those three things are probably absolutely integral to being a DPM.

Kiran Kapur (host) (22:54):
Is it a fun role?

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (22:56):
Well, it depends on what sort of projects you're managing, I suppose. But I think because there's an immediacy to it, because it's a fluid role in that you can constantly put new products out very quickly. You can iterate new products when something like AI comes out. For instance, the development of AI over the last 18 months across the majority of major digital platforms. So again, if you think your slacks, your HubSpots, GA four, Google ads, all of those big players have immediately plugged AI in, which means at some point there was a product management team that went well, we need to put this in now. And that happened very, very quickly. I think the immediacy is quite fun and the fact that you're always putting new technology in, it's not a case of being stuck doing plough, for instance, when plough haven't really changed for a hundred years, you can actually be right at the edge and say, right, what we are building now is going to improve your life like no one's ever been able to do previously. So I think that immediacy is really, really fun. I think sometimes the technicalities of it, if a product digitally doesn't work the way it should, it can be quite depressing. So much code and it's so complex that that can be quite a difficult thing to solve. But if you are customer centric and you are good at what you do right at the beginning, if you're planning is all in place and you stick to that, those things shouldn't be an issue too much further down the line.

Kiran Kapur (host) (24:26):
And you tutor our Digital Product Manager apprentices. So you're seeing people at sort of fairly early career stage wanting to come into digital product management. Do you see any things that people misunderstand or things that they're really excited about doing in their role?

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (24:41):
I think they're excited about the fact that it's not making spanners! That makes a big difference to the younger crowd particularly. I think it's because generally speaking, if you're in a digital product management role or a digital product management team, the culture is usually pretty customer centric and it's very tech centric. So if you're of that mind, then actually it's a really fun place to work because it's not about, I mean obviously there's lots of internal stakeholder management anyway, but those cultures tend to be very open to new ideas. There's a lot of discussion about what the customer needs. It's innovative. So there's a lot of ways of trying to solve issues rather than just, well, this is the way we've always done it, because you can't work like that digitally because the same tomorrow as it was yesterday. So that openness is really, really attractive to people coming in, I think, compared to more traditional product management positions.

Kiran Kapur (host) (25:39):
Fantastic. Richard Kendrick, thank you very much for your time and your overview. Just before we stop, is there any one thing that you would say to somebody who's interested in this as a career?

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (25:50):
I would say keep close to the customer. That would be it all the way through. It doesn't matter what you're making or how you're making it. Keep close to the customer, find out what they need and solve that need, and that will be 50% of your problems done there.

Kiran Kapur (host) (26:06):
That's good advice for any marketer, but particularly in this role. Thank you very much indeed for your time.

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (26:10):
Most welcome.