Without a doubt, digital acceleration was the over-arching theme of 2020. With consumers forced to stay at home, businesses had to rush to find ways to reach them where they were. Fortunately, this is where product leaders and their teams have the chance to excel. In our final Speaker Series event for January, Cognizant Product VP Jeremy Horn, aka “The Product Guy”, shares with audiences exactly how product managers can be the driving force behind digital transformation.
Watch the full video above, keep reading to catch the highlights, and pop over to our events page to join us for more product insights at our upcoming events.
On product manager driven digital transformation
The pandemic flipped the industry trend of digital acceleration into hyper-gear. According to Jeremy, though, 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail to reach their goals. Lucky for the product community, product managers are the secret weapons to ensuring success.
“Digital transformation is, essentially, the ongoing process of bringing together business and tech to deliver better outcomes for customers. What was once an important priority before, is now completely critical in the new remote world.”
“Product managers help ensure the success of digital transformation by validating hypotheses through experimentation. Essentially, product management is risk management. It’s the ability to spot potential issues. Applying a product-mindset enables continuous innovation, improvement, and optimization.”
On what makes a great product manager
Without even prompting, Jeremy dove into one of our favorite questions to ask our guests. With digital transformation falling more and more on product teams, it’s great product managers that get the job done.
“A product is any item or service you sell to satisfy a need for a customer. The success of these products hinges on the ability of the product manager. If someone wants to help people and they’re not a product manager, that’s someone I want on my team.”
“When we’re talking about who a product manager is; they’re the problem solvers. They understand real people’s problems and serve as a sounder for people inside the company as well as stakeholders. “
“A great product manager thinks in terms of impact. Will this wow our customers and make our product indispensable?”
On continuous innovation
Even after a product completes a successful digital transformation, it’s up to the product team to hold onto that growth mindset and keep driving forward. Finishing out his presentation Jeremy speaks on the need for adopting a mindset of continuous innovation. Put simply, he says it’s time to get rid of the “Fail Quickly” mindset and change it to “Learn Faster”
“A project run on continuous innovation moves faster and delivers faster. It’s about taking those pivots and layering more finely the incremental steps for higher business value.”
“Use live metrics for user feedback. Product teams need to be deeply ingrained into the client ecosystem to collaboratively accelerate success within the vision. Create an environment that fosters problem solving, innovation, and creativity.”
This week’s webinar was sponsored in part by Indicative – the leading Customer Analytics platform that enables product and marketing teams to make informed decisions by thoroughly understanding and exploring user behavior across every touchpoint.
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This week’s webinar was sponsored in part by Vonage – APIs that help you deliver communications services that matter, anywhere.
Find out more