Digital transformation member roles

Digital transformation member roles. The eighth part of Acquiring and Organizing Talent to Drive Digital Transformation (DX) Success explores the roles and importance of each member in a digital transformation organization. Learn the roles of product owners, project managers, designers, developers, and operators and their contributions to project success.

Digital transformation member roles and organizational importance

We’ve talked a lot about the importance of building a digital transformation organization around experienced and highly skilled people whenever possible. Once you’ve gone through this painstaking process and have a minimal DX organization in place, it’s time to speed up execution. Just like any other IT project, a DX organization is made up of teams to execute individual projects, and people are assigned detailed R&Rs (roles and responsibilities). First, let’s take a look at how a typical IT project team is organized for better understanding.

Key roles in a digital transformation project: Product Owner

There is a role called the Product Owner (PO) or Product Manager who takes ownership of the entire product and oversees the entire project (you could call them the DX leader). This is the person who analyzes the ideas coming from various sources, decides whether or not to proceed with the project, defines what to actually build, and further decides on the minimum feature set required and the release date. They lead the entire project team and are responsible for making the final decisions about what needs to be done to make things work.

The role of the designer: the importance of user experience

Next up are the designers. In addition to GUI designers, who produce traditional design deliverables, there are UI designers, who define the user interface, and UX designers, who design the user experience. Of these, UX has become increasingly important in recent years. They design the user experience based on a deep understanding of the people who will be using the product. They are responsible for the navigation and flow of what is offered. It’s no exaggeration to say that most of the apps we’re so comfortable using on mobile are the result of these UX designers.

Project manager: responsible for project schedule, resources, and costs

Then there’s the project manager. Often referred to as PMs, they are responsible for delivering the defined product on time, at cost, and with limited resources, meaning that they view the execution as a project and track and manage the scheduling and phasing of tasks to keep the project on schedule and within scope. Whereas the product manager or product owner described above is the larger role of defining how the product will be built, the project manager is the one who actually builds the product within a given timeframe. In the marketplace, these two roles are sometimes confused, but they are clearly distinct.

Developers: the key to project success

Then there are the engineers, or developers. Developers are the ones who make something out of nothing, and the success or failure of a real-world IT project often depends on them. Since most digital product deliverables are software, such as IT systems, web, or apps, the role of the developer is of utmost importance.

Developers are the invisible hands that use programming languages to make the product we’ve defined work, bringing the graphical screens and user experiences created by designers to life. Of course, there are many different types of developers, including programmers, architects, DBAs, front-end engineers, back-end engineers, and so on, but they all contribute to the creation of a product. The biggest role of a developer is to understand a given requirement, determine how to create it, and execute it.

Operators and marketers: roles in the ongoing success of your service

Next, there’s the operator. This is the person who is responsible for ensuring that the services that customers use and experience after launching a digital-based product run smoothly. Operators can be further broken down into service operations, system operations, and infrastructure operations. Service operations is what we often refer to as customer service.

They are responsible for responding to customer inquiries, checking and managing the operational metrics of the actual service. System operations, on the other hand, is responsible for maintaining the system as a whole from a development perspective. Infrastructure operations is responsible for maintaining the server infrastructure where the system is located. In recent years, the concept of DevOps has spread, and development and operation are sometimes combined. However, it’s important to keep in mind that development and operations are two distinct roles.

Finally, there’s product marketing. In some cases, product managers are also marketers, but digital products or services require different competencies because they require marketing activities on various online channels. It’s also worth noting that there are different areas of marketing that are optimized for digital environments, such as marketing based on direct communication with customers through social media and performance marketing, such as data-driven growth hacking.

When you look at IT projects in detail, the job roles are very different. It’s important to recognize these differences when assembling and executing a project team. Sometimes, however, the challenge comes in the middle of the execution, when people are too loyal to their R&R and become very assertive. This is a common problem, especially when you have a project team of people with different specialties. A designer might argue that feature A should be included from a user experience perspective, while a developer might say that implementing A as is would drive up the development schedule and difficulty too much.

Validate and execute product ideas

And they don’t back down from their claims. To avoid this confusion, it’s important for product managers to clearly define each person’s role early on in the project, and to build consensus by defining the decision-making priorities for our product in advance. For example, we can define the following upfront.

• As a product manager, it’s your job to make sure your product is valuable, usable, and implementable for your customers.
• Development is important, but for our product, UX design is the number one decision.
• Developers think in terms of implementation, but users use and evaluate products based on their feelings and experiences.
• Developers are not UX design experts. Developers are focused on developing for a given UX.
• Product ideas are validated with potential customers.
• We need to have a working prototype so we can test our ideas with potential customers.
• Product managers should take overall responsibility for identifying the scope of the minimum functional product and minimizing the time and resources required.

DX projects are just as prone to failure as traditional IT projects. This means that if you have never worked on an IT project in an existing organization, it is difficult to understand the content, let alone have visibility into the middle of the process. That’s why it’s important for executives to delegate power to POs, even if they can’t check the content, and make sure that they hear the principles of the role and execution direction from the organizational management level mentioned earlier and follow them well.