This is my perspective on digital products. It's less about grouping technology and more about how you work and focus people. What comes with digital products are digital product managers. The digital product is whatever technology you combine to create value for an end consumer. If you deliver that value in the form of a product or service(s) or even application support, it doesn't matter. The point is that some upstream software provides downstream value to a consumer or group of consumers. This is what the models need to support.
This makes the product manager responsible for value delivery first and foremost. Everything that introduces risk to delivering that value is of interest to the product manager. Going live and completing a project on time are almost irrelevant. The only thing that matters for the Digital Product Manager is delivering value to the end customer commensurate with the organization's investment.
Digital products are combinations of applications, services, and hardware. I believe the art is packing. We need to create packages large enough to warrant an executive-level conversation about investment and are worth actively managing their lifecycle. For example, in most companies, there wouldn't be an Apple Laptop product manager responsible for distributing and supporting Apple Laptops to employees. There might be an End-Point support Digital Product with a Digital Product Manager in charge of deciding which end-point devices to include to make the employees most effective. They meet with an executive team quarterly to justify the ongoing investment in their product and prove that value is being delivered as expected.
Since the people on this thread are familiar with ServiceNow, I'll give an example of how you might carve out ServiceNow products so they each have Product Managers. It's important to remember that these product managers may use ServiceNow, but they might also include other products. The product manager is tasked with understanding what their organization needs.
In the picture above, we use products that run on the ServiceNow platform to provide value to an Airport. This large airport has several divisions, some of which have their own IT Service Desks. We have an ITSM product manager that we put in charge of convincing all divisions to share their ITSM services.
We also have an Airport Vendor Services Product Manager. Their product consolidates interactions between the Airport's vendors and the Airport Administration. They use ServiceNow for part of their product. Still, they're also responsible for electronic payments and digital signatures, which means they'd need to package other products into their Product besides ServiceNow.
Getting back to CSDM and the arrangement of Digital Products, we want to create Product Models that can accommodate arrangements for these Product Managers to manage. We can bundle things like ServiceNow Customer Service Management, Docusign, and Stripe so the Airport Service Product Manager can see everything it takes to deliver their Product. They can get reports on all the contracts and work being done to support their product, among other things. This combination of technology is unique to the airport and provides value through digital services to the airport vendors and administration teams. The consumers don't necessarily need to see the actual product; they can still see and consume the Digital Service they've been consuming.
One last example: I'm done with my Saturday babble. The ServiceNow Platform can and should be managed as a product. Their consumers are tenants on their platform, not ITSM customers. The ServiceNow Platform product manager often becomes the default product manager for every tenant. They are usually tasked with making every product successful. This may be OK when you only run ITSM. Still, as you start to get more tenants, more product managers, ideally ones that better understand the consumers, are necessary to get maximum value from the platform.
