To meet ever-expanding customer demands, businesses are turning to the expertise of Product Managers and Product Owners, who play a central role in rapidly building, integrating, and expanding technology solutions. In this blog post, we explore three business use cases that highlight the indispensable role of Product Managers and Product Owners in driving successful transformations. Additionally, we share a client success story on how our company's collaboration with a healthcare company exemplifies the power of product leadership in creating customer-centric solutions.

The Power of Product Managers and Product Owners

No longer relegated to order-taking, Product roles are now in the strategy meetings, part of business case development, and integral to the development of the digital systems that allow businesses across all industries to deliver their products and services successfully.  Product roles are most impactful when they encompass a range of responsibilities, including ones not often associated with a Product leader.

Product leaders are more than arbiters of Scrum sessions, daily standups, user stories and acceptance criteria, and quality assurance. Today’s most successful leaders have extensive business savvy, understand customer needs, know technology, maintain a user experience (UX) and the customer experience (CX) lens, can navigate politics, are shrewd decision makers, and are great leaders of individuals and teams.

A Product leader will successfully collaborate with senior leaders on business case and outcomes, lead cross-functional teams with empathy for all roles, bridge the gap between customer expectations and technical implementation, and deliver superior technology systems, integrations or automation that drive growth and customer loyalty.

How Product Makes a Difference

Enhanced User Experience: Logistics companies face immense challenges due to a fragmented technology landscape that affects customer satisfaction. By engaging Product Managers, these companies can leverage experts who know how to properly assess the existing environment to identify the opportunities for improvement. Dissecting and understanding complexly connected systems is not an easy task. The Product leader must know how to streamline platform interactions, conduct user research, and iterate on designs that will have material impacts for customers. Product Managers and Owners are experts at finding user pain points and creating new features, changing existing ones, or constructing a solution that will improve efficiency and enhance user experience.

Scalable E-commerce Solutions: E-commerce success is 100% determined by the customer experience and a solid product or service. A Product team, led by a Product Owner can assess the existing technology stack, review the available data, develop new data and reporting, and confirm where bottlenecks exist in the order fulfillment process. This expertise is very wide and goes beyond only the technology. With the guidance of the Product Owner, the company will be able to see influences and impacts beyond the transaction flow. Having this information helps identify new, cutting-edge technology changes that can help optimize the supply chain.

Transforming Healthcare Services: Healthcare companies are encumbered by ‘the way it’s always been done’. Whether it is the myriad of technology platforms, the disconnected nature of the services provided, or the need to be absolutely secure in the handling of sensitive patient data. Introducing Product Management is how these organizations can better serve their clinicians and greatly improve the customer experience for obtaining medical records. Product will look at the internal user experience, the clinician experience, and the patient experience. In the case of Healthcare, there are always these three primary audiences whose experiences must be carefully balanced. Product can bring stakeholders together and navigate the competing forces of the different divisions within a healthcare provider system. Product can work with the CFO to forecast the revenue changes and cost savings associated with any potential solutions. Product in healthcare is a true game changer.   

APGET’s Success Story

Our client, a large national healthcare provider, needed to leap-frog the competitors in the clinician placement marketplace. Our team of Product Managers and Product Owners were hired to find customer-centric solutions that would improve the clinical experience while still considering the existing technologies and operations that had to run behind the scenes. On top of all these demands, we sought a transformation that would ensure better patient experiences as a result of better clinician experiences. Lastly, the client was not interested in a giant system replacement project. That was fine by our team because that is exactly where we excel.

Our team was able to utilize all of the skills mentioned in this article to make change and introduce a well-designed clinician mobile app experience. Our Product Managers and Owners:

• Conducted extensive product analysis

• Lead broad-reaching user feedback sessions

• Delivered market competitive analysis

• Utilized forwarding-thinking design principles

• Factored in the existing platforms underpinning the mobile app

• Empathetically navigated options with the many stakeholder groups within the company who would be affected by any changes 

The resulting mobile app creates a user-centric clinician experience that will reduce the friction of managing assignments, accessing core job role information, and even accepting new opportunities. The app will enable clinicians to better manage their day which leads to improved healthcare access and better-coordinated care for their patients. The robust nature with which we approached the client’s need could not have been done without a level of expertise typically found across highly skilled engineers, savvy financial analysts, expert marketing teams, and the business leaders responsible for the company’s P&L. Our Product team brought knowledge and expertise in all of those areas in order to build the best possible solution. 

Product Managers and Product Owners are Essential

Product Managers and Product Owners are central to the success of solutions that underpin businesses' ability to meet customer demands. Their expertise in understanding user needs, aligning development efforts, and ensuring products meet business objectives enables companies to thrive in today's competitive landscape. The business use cases and examples presented in this blog post highlight how product leadership drives success and fosters customer-centric innovation across various industries. By harnessing the power of Product Managers and Product Owners, businesses can build transformative solutions that cater to evolving customer expectations.