Enhancing Product Management Performance through Digitalization: Advantages, Challenges, Design Fields

Abstract

In dynamic environments, product management plays a key role in aligning innovation, customer needs, and strategic decision-making. Digitalization offers significant opportunities to enhance this role by enabling data-driven insights for improved customer and product understanding—yet its successful implementation requires a fundamental transformation. Based on a systematic literature review, this study synthesizes key advantages, challenges, and design fields that shape this transformation. The results highlight performance benefits across business, product, process, and decision-making dimensions, while also uncovering barriers rooted in strategy, organization, people, and technology. To address these barriers, critical enablers and conditions for success are identified. Four overarching design fields provide orientation for structuring digitalization efforts and guiding organizational change in industrial practice. The paper provides both a conceptual foundation and a practical guide for companies seeking to digitalize their product management effectively.