In this editorial, ZEFR Product Lead Bharat Manglani takes the holistic Platform Product Manager view to maximize the customer value proposition.
As a Platform Product Manager, you are not narrowly focused on any one product. Use the cross-product nature of the role to understand how to maximize the customer value proposition. Bring your objective perspective to help steer the product strategy in the right direction.
Consider Your Holistic Value Proposition
While keeping the holistic product in mind, take stock of the holistic customer value proposition. For example, many technology vendors offer solutions that add value to their digital advertising portfolios. Each solution has its own value proposition to address customer needs. The before ad serving solution could help to ensure customers are serving their ad to target audiences. While ensuring the ad is actually in view on the consumer’s device. The after-ad serving solution can then provide reporting on the viewability rate for each ad served.
Both solutions play an essential role in helping customers increase their return on their digital investment. The first solution helps increase the likelihood that the ad will be in view for the target audience. And, therefore, increase the chances the ad will have an impact. The second solution provides the final layer of verification to confirm whether the ad was actually in view. Although these offerings provide transactional value, they miss out on the opportunity to offer a holistic value proposition that delivers 10x the impact.
With The Powers Of Your Products Combined
How might we add to the value proposition so customers can make informed strategic decisions to meet their business objectives? The holistic Platform Product Manager view considers how these two product lines might work together to achieve this. The pre-solution benefits from the learnings gained through the post-solution. Armed with insights from the latter on where the viewability rate is performing poorly, we can tweak the pre-solution to optimize campaign strategies. Perhaps certain publishers or devices tend to fare better. If so, we can run an experiment to verify and improve future strategies accordingly.
The Way Forward
As the Platform Product Manager, you play a crucial role in bringing the holistic value proposition to fruition. Your understanding and network across product lines will help bridge potential product cohesion gaps. In the previous example, what insights can you glean from the post-solution transaction reporting? What experiments can be run to validate hypotheses gleaned from this analysis? Then, as the theories become validated, how can these optimizations be built into the holistic product offering? You will play a key role in digging into these problem sets, ideating upon solutions, and rolling out the holistic product to customers. Enjoy the journey and celebrate the impact upon completion!
About the speaker
Bharat Manglani is a Senior Product Manager at Zefr, an ad tech company focused on enabling content-level targeting and measurement across the world’s largest walled garden platforms. He was also a Product Manager at Human Security, a cybersecurity company focused on verifying the humanity of transactions over the Internet and disrupting the economics of cybercrime. Currently, he manages Zefr\'s reporting and analytics products, and his passion lies in protecting the Internet by helping to identify brand unsafe content.