WHAT DOES A DIGITAL PRODUCT OWNER DO?
Published: Nov 25, 2024 - The Digital Product Owner structures, prioritizes, and refines the product backlog to enhance client experience and align with user expectations. This role transforms the Product Manager's vision into detailed requirements, actively engaging stakeholders and embodying the customer's voice throughout the development process. Responsible for the product roadmap, the owner ensures continuous improvement, advocates for innovative solutions, and leads the development team in stakeholder interactions.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Digital Product Owner
1. Digital Product Owner Duties
- Communication Leadership: Lead product-based communications and proactively manage strategic partnerships.
- Business-Tech Alignment: Act as the conduit between the business and technology in defining digital solutions to business problems and objectives.
- Collaboration: Work closely with colleagues in healthcare management, technology, data, privacy, proposition, transformation, and strategy.
- Problem Resolution: Maintain a pulse on partner feedback, provide prompt and proper resolution of project, business, and technical challenges, and provide meaningful feedback to respective Bupa teams to improve the user experience.
- Data Reporting: Compile, analyze, and report on milestones/KPI metrics, summarising partner support metrics.
- Process Optimization: Use data to independently and proactively optimize existing processes and improve the product experience.
- Product Vision: Responsible for defining the product vision, articulated through a product roadmap, to achieve business goals and outcomes.
- Backlog Management: Managing the product backlog including prioritization through value/effort assessments, financial modeling, and identification of customer experience improvements.
- User Story Creation: Responsible for the creation of user stories, refining requirements and defining release and sprint goals.
- Data-Driven Decisions: Responsible for data-driven decision-making through analytics, financial and customer-driven analysis.
- KPI Tracking: Track, measure and be accountable for achieving product KPIs at a product, departmental, and group level.
- Agile Leadership: Partner with the Business and Delivery teams to explore and refine a roadmap of initiatives and lead them to market in a scaled Agile framework.
- Customer Understanding: Maintain an understanding of the customer and a vision for the product/service that you actively share with stakeholders and the delivery team (Squad).
2. Digital Product Owner Details
- Platform Ownership: Hold ownership and responsibility of the eBanking platform of WM Switzerland and UK inclusive Mobile Apps.
- Product Vision and Roadmap: Build and synthesize a product vision, roadmap and backlog, to reflect business and stakeholder’s priorities.
- Strategy Management: Management and delivery of the strategy to agreed timeframes.
- User Support Optimization: Reduce the time to support the key internal users.
- Backlog Management: Manage and own the ongoing backlog for the product.
- Partner Management: Manage relationships with 3rd party partners.
- Business Analysis: Carry out detailed analysis of the business/customer needs, requirements, impact, scope, risks, and benefits.
- Consultation Leadership: Lead the consultation process with the Product Council stakeholders when presenting new ideas and sharing transparency of the product backlog/roadmap.
- Collaboration with Technology: Work collaboratively with the Technology team to ensure continuity with future development plans.
- Backlog Documentation: Ensure all projects/enhancements are created and maintained in the product backlog, with relevant support documentation (specifications and data contracts).
- Prioritization Management: Ensure the product backlog is accurately prioritized through regular discussion and review with the Senior Customer Product Owner.
- Stakeholder Management: Lead communication and stakeholder management for allocated products.
- Business Interaction: Interacts closely with business owners in the business lines and markets.
- KPI Determination: Determine associated target KPIs (e.g., business value delivered, user satisfaction, time to market).
3. Digital Product Owner Responsibilities
- Client Experience Design: Structure the items or features to drive a consistent, efficient, and satisfying client experience, aligned with end users' expectations and feedback.
- Backlog Management: Manage the product backlog such as adding, deleting, evolving and refining product backlog items.
- Prioritization: Orders the product backlog and maintains it prioritized.
- Progress Communication: Regularly communicate the status (progress, readiness and prioritizations) of the product backlog to the different stakeholders and sponsors.
- Client Support: Support Clients and Businesses to increase usage and leverage the value of the digital platform.
- Requirement Translation: Transform the high-level vision of the Product Manager into detailed requirements, continuously engaging key stakeholders from across the business.
- Customer Advocacy: Be the voice of the customer through the development process.
- Release & Sprint Planning: Share a clear vision and goal at the beginning of every release and sprint, drive and maintain this throughout delivery.
- Backlog Formation: Formation and delivery of a clear backlog, with prioritized feature lists sequenced for efficient delivery.
- Product Improvement: Create intuitive and engaging solutions, drive continuous improvement, flag innovation or changes that impact customer experience and generally push to ensure we are the best we can be in product delivery.
- Customer Service Liaison: Acting as an ambassador and primary contact for queries related to the customer service platform.
- Stakeholder Representation: Leading and Representing the development team in front of stakeholders and users.
- Roadmap Development: Responsible for roadmap development and alignment of expectations globally.
4. Digital Product Owner Job Summary
- Iterative Release Delivery: Deliver iterative releases according to the agile methodology, responsible for the development, maintenance, testing, and evaluation of the customer service platform.
- Backlog Management: Facilitating prioritization and backlog development.
- Trend Awareness: Be on top of current customer service platform/CRM trends to impact the direction of the customer service platform (based on Freshdesk).
- Data Analysis: Analyze insight from the platform to understand customer and employee behavior.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with cross-functional teams and third parties, including administration platforms and insurers, to create best practices and drive meaningful change to the client experience.
- Stakeholder Partnership: Partner closely with internal and external stakeholders to resolve production and implementation issues, with minimal impact to clients.
- Platform Planning: Lead the planning, prioritization, development, and implementation of key changes within Vanguard’s Personal Investor and Superannuation platforms, ensuring key business objectives are met.
- Client-Centric Approach: Ensure we maintain a client-centric approach when building the Adviser Portal and meet advisers’ needs.
- Performance Monitoring: Monitor assigned digital channel performance, adoption, and metrics to evaluate progress and identify channel uplift actions.
- Platform Improvement: Continually improving Heathrow’s Commercial Digital platforms, with a focus on managing content to drive revenue generation.
- Prioritization & Roadmap Development: Prioritizing the Product Backlog and Product Roadmap by working closely with stakeholders across the organization to determine key commercial priorities and using data to support that decision-making.
- Agile Methodology Application: Using Agile methodologies to work hand-in-hand with Technology colleagues and guide 3rd Party Suppliers to the successful delivery of the desired updates to platforms.
- Brand Alignment: Ensuring alignment to the Heathrow Brand including visual design, tone of voice, and passenger focus.
- Digital Strategy Support: Providing digital expertise to support the wider business, to influence change to the Heathrow Commercial Digital Strategy through research, insight, and understanding of industry trends.
5. Digital Product Owner Accountabilities
- Subject Matter Expertise: Provides subject matter expertise, explaining product vision and user stories to the team to ensure requirements are understood and customer value is delivered.
- Iteration Planning: Iteration planning including backlog prioritization and feature refinement.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Cross-functional collaboration to collect information to support feature development and delivery.
- Customer Experience Definition: Work with the UX designers to define the customer experience across the digital assets.
- Backend Process Definition: Work with engineering and architecture teams to define the backend processes to support the customer experience digital and omnichannel touchpoints.
- Dependency Management: Leads the team in identifying dependencies and tradeoffs as well as problem-solving risks that may appear in the Team Backlog.
- Business Alignment: Works with product management and stakeholders to align on business value, problem statements, and customer pain points that are strategic priorities for CVS Health.
- Release Validation: Validate the application releases and provide signoffs.
- Demo Collaboration: Collaborates with the team to produce and present the PI system demo to program stakeholders.
- Goal Setting & KPI Development: Establish clear goals and objectives for the products and develop Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will clearly indicate the progress towards those goals and business outcomes.
- Agile Team Participation: Be an integral part of teams comprising the Eurobank Digital Factory and participate/contribute to the daily and weekly ceremonies.
- Pre-Rollout Testing: Responsible for the pre-rollout acceptance testing of new services.