Bridging the Tech Enablement Gap in Product Management

WRITTEN BY: GAïANA JOSEPH

Bridging the Tech Enablement Gap in Product Management

In today’s product landscape, it isn’t enough to simply write requirements and prioritize features. The best Product Managers serve as connectors, aligning business goals, customer needs, and technical realities. Yet, in my experience working across Digital Product and Digital Operations, I’ve seen a consistent knowledge gap: many Product Managers aren’t equipped with the technical and operational literacy required to fully enable their teams, causing a tech enablement gap.

This isn’t about learning how to code or becoming an engineer. It’s about building enough fluency to understand the systems that power our products, the dependencies that shape delivery, and the operational levers that can unlock growth. Too often, Product Managers stop at the “what” and “why” and leave the “how” entirely to engineering. While collaboration is essential, this gap in tech enablement can slow teams down, introduce misalignment, and limit innovation.

SaaS IS NOT THE SILVER BULLET

I’ve also seen how this gap shows up at the company level. Many agencies and SaaS providers sell software or tools as a silver bullet, but the founders and teams who purchase them often don’t know how to actually use those products to solve their business needs. For example:

• Brands often invest in Shopify Plus but never fully optimize checkout flows or leverage automation to improve conversion rates.
  
• Companies adopt Salesforce Marketing Cloud but struggle with segmentation and campaign orchestration, leading to underwhelming ROI.
  
• Teams roll out Klaviyo for lifecycle marketing but don’t set up consent management or data integrations properly, limiting what the platform can do.
  

Without the right tech enablement, these investments remain underutilized. Teams can’t scale effectively, and the business never captures the full value.

STRATEGY & EXECUTION SIDE BY SIDE

At Flywheel Strategy, we approach this differently. We’re not just strategists; we are executing alongside our partners every single day. For example, with Plum Diamonds, we started by auditing the e-commerce site to identify friction points in the customer journey and gaps in conversion opportunities. 

From there, we delivered a set of actionable recommendations, then worked directly with their team to implement them using the tools they already had in place — from refining Wishlist and custom-built Drop-a-Hint flows in Klaviyo to adding video modules on site and optimizing related product recommendations on PDPs. By focusing on enablement rather than unnecessary new tools, we helped Plum Diamonds unlock more value from their existing tech stack and accelerate their ability to test, learn, and scale.

We understand the big picture, but we also know how to navigate system architecture and workflows to ensure strategy translates into results. This combination of strategy and execution sets us apart as and allows us to accelerate impact for the brands we support.

The future of product management isn’t just about vision. It’s about execution. And execution depends on closing the gap in tech enablement.

If you’d like to learn more about my work as a Digital Product Manager and how Flywheel Strategy helps teams not just buy tools but actually use them to drive growth, I’d love to connect.