Key Points
- Organizations must product manage both the front and back end of their digital presences.
- Both the front and back end are highly related.
- Use the table in this article to ensure you are covering both the front and back end.
Product management is crucial for the success of a website. For the purposes of this brief article, let's say web product (as opposed to project or program) management is considering your web presence as a whole to ensure a high quality and consistent experience for the users. That said there are two aspects to product management for the web: product managing the CMS implementation (the backend) and product managing the website itself (the front-end as viewed by a site visitor). These two are highly related, but and the main reason to bring up these two angles is to make sure you cover each.
| Responsibility | Front end (visitor experience) | Back end (CMS implementation) |
|---|---|---|
| Overall consistency | Yes, of the site itself | Yes, of the implementation |
| Overall quality | Yes, of the site itself | Yes, of the implementation |
| Functionality | Quality from end user perspective, including not bloating the site | Quality from the technical perspective |
| Content | Overall content strategy, including training content contributors | Technology supports strategy and enforces standards as possible |
| Information Architecture | To ensure consistent implementation on site | Technology implemented to naturally enable official information architecture |
| Future-proofing | Watching trends to weave in new functionality | Implementing in a way that reasonably allows future functionality |
| Metrics | Website metrics | Publishing and performance metrics |
| Users | Primarily website users | Mostly CMS users, although website user needs always take precedence |
Both are needed for a successful large website, and need to be balanced. What happens if one of these is weak?
Weak management of the website front-end results in:
Bloated and unfocused site
Inconsistent site (if no enforcement and training)
Unhappy external users
Weak management of the backend results in:
Implementation effort higher than ideal
Unstable implementation, and difficult to maintain or add functionality to
Inconsistent site (if tool not aligned with standards)
Unhappy internal users
Obviously, both are interrelated. For example, in an unfocused website product management environment, the implementation could become unstable just because unreasonable and incoherent requests are demanded and delivered.