How Digital Experience Intelligence Empowers Product Managers to Lead Successful Digital Transformation

Digital transformation investments are expected to reach $3.4 trillion by 2026. This is no surprise since every aspect of business is now shaped by digital technology, systems, and processes. Maintaining relevance in this continual shift requires product management that is data-driven, aligned with customer demands, and continually improves solutions.

In this article, we’ll explore how product managers can leverage digital experience intelligence (DXI)  to support digital transformation and optimize customer-centricity, agility, and processes.

Key takeaways

• Key elements of digital experience intelligence that empower product managers

• How product managers can use DXI advantages for product strategy and implementation 

• Identifying and overcoming common digital transformation challenges

• Best practices for a digital-first approach to product development and customer focus

The role of product managers in digital transformation

Let’s take a step back and appreciate the critical role that product managers – often at the helm of innovation – play within companies. They’re typically the team members closest to the customer and are adept at identifying needs, charting a path for a company’s products and features, collaborating with teams, and ultimately turning a product vision into reality.

Product managers often act as change agents of digital transformation – intentionally or not. Because of their pivotal role, they need to have a digital-first focus on customers, identify market and technology trends, and navigate those priorities to align with business goals. At the end of the day, the product strategy and roadmap need to be in lock-step with all of these factors, which is no mean feat.

Because digital transformation is a constantly moving target, making data-driven decisions about products goes hand in hand. And it’s also one of the biggest challenges product management teams face–whether it’s extracting product insights to drive new features, gaining feedback from data silos in companies, or keeping an eye on competitive threats.

One of the biggest outcomes of digital transformation is the emphasis on customer experience. With all the digital tools and solutions available to customers, expectations are sky-high that devices, apps, and every other technology should be fast and work seamlessly–anytime and anywhere. For that reason, product managers always need to be mindful of the customer mindset during the planning and implementation process.

Understanding digital experience intelligence

Digital experience intelligence is a powerful set of tools that can play a central role in connecting customer-centric data analytics with digital transformation objectives. These platforms capture, analyze, and deliver comprehensive insights about customer interactions and product performance. 

A digital experience intelligence platform delivers rich insights for a complete picture of your customers’ interactions–not just the what but the why, unlike standalone tools. DXI platforms combine data from product analytics, heatmaps, session replay, and other tools. A digital experience intelligence platform combines all of these analytics into a single source of truth and provides advanced insights to help product managers make data-driven decisions.

Drilling down deeper into DXI capabilities, you have:

• Product analytics, which collects, analyzes, and interprets data about how users interact with your product. This data can be used to improve the product by identifying areas where users are struggling, finding ways to make the product more user-friendly, and tracking the effectiveness of changes that have been made. 

• Performance analytics measures performance variables like functionality, reachability, and responsiveness. Leveraging real user monitoring (RUM), a variety of performance metrics can be measured based on real-time user interaction with a website or native mobile app.

• Behavioral analytics captures and analyzes how visitors behave on websites, apps, and other digital experiences by tracking their actions, capturing, for example, how long a user stays on a page or screen, elements they interact with, and actions they take.

• Digital analytics are tools and processes used to collect, measure, analyze, and interpret behavioral data. It can include websites, mobile apps, email campaigns, customer interactions, and other data sources. 

• Voice of the customer (VoC) analytics provide data on what customers are thinking, such as why a customer is dissatisfied and how many users are affected by an issue or why a customer is delighted, so you can replicate that experience. You can combine VOC data with other customer sentiment analytics for a more complete picture.

• Customer journey analytics is gathering and analyzing key data of the customer experience across every customer journey touchpoint. These analytics combine a variety of data sources and contextualized visualizations to guide decisions on where and how to improve the digital experience.

Empowering product managers with advanced DXI insights

Connecting digital transformation with DXI is an easy leap of faith–because all of these customer experience and product performance insights tell a story for the product manager. They offer key benefits in the product management process.

Better data-driven decision-making: With real-time and historical data about product usage, user interactions, and performance, product managers can leverage data to inform product development decisions, prioritize features, and refine product roadmaps.

Deeper customer insights: DXI delivers improved insights about behaviors, preferences, and pain points to drive product development and prioritization decisions, ensuring that they line up with customer needs and desires.

Improved overall UX: Knowing issues and bottlenecks for customers opens up opportunities to collaborate with development teams and design customer-centric products that resonate with users.

Increased personalization: With advanced user insights, features and improvements can be informed by those analytics to enhance user engagement and increase customer satisfaction.

Optimize product performance: Product managers can use DXI to track how products are performing in real time. This allows them to detect and address issues as they arise, and even proactively to ensure a high-quality user experience.

Identifying and overcoming digital transformation challenges 

Over the course of the product life cycle, as well as for new product development, adopting a DXI-first approach can help solve digital transformation challenges. But it isn’t always a clear-cut path. Product management teams may have the best intentions, but several factors could impede digital transformation. They include:

Data silos: Many teams have their own way of operating, sharing insights, and other processes that are hard to change. Oftentimes it’s different systems and team dynamics that can lead to independent decision-making or even actions taken that could conflict with other teams’ decisions. When stakeholder groups have the same access to robust insights, they can collaboratively make decisions that put the customer first.

 Lack of customer feedback: Depending on the company culture, customer insights may or may not be a high priority. It could be that the product has been extremely successful through each release, giving a false sense of comfort (there’s always new competition around the corner) or simply a lack of tools and technology in place to measure feedback. With DXI, analytics are automatically measured, analyzed, and available in real time, so the heavy lifting is done. It’s up to product management to take the next steps.

Data isn’t prioritized in decision-making: Maybe a company is monitoring product and customer analytics from various angles, but the data hasn’t been used to make decisions about the next steps. Sometimes product management decisions can be made “on gut instinct” without a quantitative basis, or the product roadmap is driven by business and revenue priorities only. Using DXI, teams can align with comprehensive analytics that tell the whole picture.

These types of changes, along with a series of connected cultural, management, and operations practices, can slowly but surely lead to a digital transformation-first approach. 

Five best practices for product managers using DXI to overcome digital transformation challenges

1. Faster iterative development: DXI fosters an incremental development approach. Product managers can continuously gather and analyze user data, allowing for agile and responsive development cycles. This results in products that evolve to meet changing customer demands continually.

2. Resource allocation: DXI helps product managers allocate their precious resources more effectively. By understanding which features or areas of the product are most critical to users, they can allocate development resources strategically and efficiently.

3. Leverage integrated technologies: As an example, Glassbox integrates third-party solutions, including web analytics, APM, A/B testing, VoC, product development, and other tools for instant and real-time access to insights. Instead of going into different systems, everything is there in one platform for a complete view and analysis.

4. Take the AI advantage: In 2023, artificial intelligence took a huge leap in awareness and usefulness–because of its powerful technology benefits. Along with machine learning, it can help product managers spot trends, predict changes in markets and customer behavior, and surface meaningful insights that help speed up improvements.

5. A single source of truth: Product management collaboration is much easier when all stakeholder teams have access to the same information. It can help product managers make a case for development, enlighten CX teams with new insights, work with security for better privacy measures, improve customer service, and a host of other cross-team benefits.  

Final thoughts

Navigating digital transformation is an ongoing challenge and opportunity for companies that want to be at the cutting edge of technology–and create great customer experiences. Product managers can be empowered by DXI to develop a customer-centric approach, fostering iterative product development and competitive advantage in the digital landscape.

Learn more about how Glassbox can help you lead digital transformation in your organization.

Are you attending ProductCon in San Francisco? Swing by Glassbox booth #2 to see how digital experience intelligence can help you transform your digital products.