How Being a Product Guy Shaping my Digital Marketing Mindset

Pratama Agus

There is no doubt that nowadays product roles are the most attractive seat for people to work on. Other than the benefits, of course, working in a product subject is reflecting how we need to respond to the transforming world. Both product design or product management things, all the focus is only about one important matter: Minding what customers feel.

When I was starting my journey digging so much learning about digital marketing, all that matters to me is how I can sell digitally. How to create good content, generating so many leads, and increasing my CTR– those are what I think my success will be defined with. Those still are, but there are so many things I missed as well.

By involving in knowing how product management works and how the well-crafted process of deciding what feature or what product needs to be developed, everything just connecting the dots I missed for several years from the digital marketing field. However, from all different perspectives, we can agree that we have one common objective which makes users' lives easier.

How I start my product management duty

It may be an unexpectedly overwhelming experience to me when I was asked to lead a scrum team while coming from zero tech background a few years ago. As time ran, I would say that I adapted well and enjoyed the process. Not only to push my eagerness to learn but also taking me to another perspective of my professional career.

Here, I am more involved in business strategy, meeting with management, getting the company direction, and of course being asked for my opinion on how things should work. Not only from the digital marketing side, but also products that would be loved by people digitally.

In every scrum cycle, I was invited to sprint planning, where the idea of improving business from all aspects would be brainstormed by many parties. And then there is a sprint review where the development progress is being updated and presented to the business team. Not to forget that we also have daily updates with the tech team so that I learn about what is the thought process happening when a product or a feature is coming out.

"Digital marketing cannot be done alone within the team, it is a must for us to have a good connection with other teams, especially the tech team"

This is where I think I have something to connect from my digital experience to product practice.

A success product, for me, is where you can find measured outcomes. That is what digital marketing is. By combining the nature, we can measure how actually our product is performing on the market. In digital marketing, I have so many exercises with the focus of having precious tracking in almost every step. Starting from a user installing the app, clicking the register button, filling up the form, and finally skipping out a certain page. All is there in a systematic dashboard.

On the other hand, there are few times I feel that some product managers are only focusing on shipped well product delivery to potential customers but forget about the tracking measurement that would decide their product value. Why are people installing the app but low in transaction? Where are people dropping? Is there something wrong with our customer flow? Yes you need trackers to know all of the answers.

Delivery is not end result

When I was in the product management role, as someone coming from a digital background, how to put some trackers is what I thought most of the time. We have generally great ideas backed with so much insightful research, but at the same time I do feel validating and proofing the hypothesis by data is something we need to know how. Ideally, the thinking is not happening after the product is launched, it should be the part of the development strategy don’t you think?

So what are we after? If you think this is the end, it is definitely not. Measuring all the metrics and all the trackers from our customers behaviour is just the beginning of our next improvement. However, it is always a step-ahead-learning if we know the full context.

How is this making me the better version of digital marketer

Now I am back to my expertise with a higher responsibility. As I understand that digital marketing cannot be done alone within the team, it is a must for us to have a good connection with other teams, especially the tech team. When it comes to new requests from us to develop new features with the objective to improve customers journey, it is not only research and data that we show to them, but also measurement tracker so that we can validate and iterate the product feature vision we want to have.

If the product is not running, we know where to fix. If all is running well, we know what makes it better. Measurements should be part of product requirement strategy.

Sometimes I feel this is just a culture issue, and may not happen in all of the industry. Here, when we try to offer a digital product or service, I think we all agree that there would be so much friction in achieving our goals, but at least we have our own standpoint where we can support other teams with valuable input.