Give Your Customers What They Want, And You'll Get What You Need

[Fred Champlain]

Today’s world continues to move at an increasingly rapid pace.  Today’s brand-new features are tomorrow’s expected baseline functionality and next week's outdated capabilities.  Digital product managers must continue to deliver new, relevant functionality to their customers if they are going to maintain a product's performance and relevance in the marketplace.

In the last blog, we looked at hypothesis-driven digital product management as a way to identify those features that will actually drive value for customers and the organization, but simply having an effective and efficient way to identify how the product needs to improve is just the start.  Those features then have to be consistently delivered to production, and they need to drive the value customers see in the product that they are using.

Any change to a product is an investment – a commitment of time, effort, and money in order to provide capabilities that are likely to have a relatively short production life before they need to be enhanced, expanded, or replaced.  Those investments have to generate a return for the organization, and that means that they must quickly deliver meaningful value to the customers that ultimately deliver that organizational benefit.

This feature-based investment approach represents the best way to ensure that digital products remain not only fit for purpose, but also optimally aligned with the shifting expectations of customers.  By understanding what customers value, through the testing of hypotheses and other approaches, digital product managers can focus their investments on optimizing that value while maintaining alignment with the organizational priorities.

For the teams delivering the work, this value focus provides context and an understanding of why work is being done, and how it benefits the customer.  In turn, this allows them to make better decisions in how features are implemented and provides a platform to strategically evolve each product rather than treating each enhancement as a separate, standalone piece of work.

Of course, doing that effectively requires the right tools, and that’s where ServiceNow enables success.  Our Now platform provides an integrated solution that allows digital product managers to manage their product’s entire lifecycle, request, and monitor work as well as integrate the release and production process in one place.

Specifically with feature-based investments, requests can be monitored as they are prioritized against all other organizational work through ServiceNow SPM.  SPM allows for the monitoring and management of work being carried out by teams, regardless of how they are working or the tools that they are using for work management

That allows digital product managers to confidently communicate plans and dates to customers.  This demonstrates not only a commitment to evolving the product in a way that works for those customers, but also a degree of transparency about when capabilities will be available that just can’t be provided without an integrated platform like ServiceNow.

At a time when you are only as good as your latest value-driving feature, that’s a key differentiator.