Think Product Experience-Led Growth (part 2)

In my last installment, I suggested we should all be talking about product EXPERIENCE-led growth, and that we need to raise the bar for Experience Design to achieve it.

I began by defining the key terms of our challenge that be pretty nebulous:

Create a meaningful experience that builds an emotional connection with customers while supporting your winning business strategy and bringing your brand to life.

In this second installment, we’re going to focus on one important tool used in Product Experience Design that’s meant to engage senior leadership and all stakeholder groups: The Experience Map.

Wait, what a Map?! Don’t go away! Part of the goal here is that this series supports your desire to be a more effective leader of a brand, not just a business — and to better guide your creative teams to ensure their work is supporting the business and your winning strategy. As a senior leader, you can be better served by this commonly used tool than you’ve likely been in the past.

And even if you’re not so much into Product Led Growth in your particular category, I’m getting into Product Design from a point of view that draws from strategy, innovation, and experience design that you might not have considered before.

Let’s grow your brand!

The usual research and experience mapping isn’t enough

The Experience Map is one of a set of tools commonly used when designing products and services so that they meet the needs of users. I’ll speak to it last.

As a brief reminder:*

An Empathy Map visualizes what users say, think, do, or feel. They are relied upon to generate the emotional dimension in a product experience — at least theoretically, but they often aren’t very surprising or interesting, sad to say, and the so-called “gift” of your product as they portray it doesn’t really feel like much of one.

A Customer Journey Map focuses on the user experience as they pursue a goal through use of a product or service. Normally the attention here begins with awareness of the product or service because of course it’s focused on the product or service, not on the brand — which can be a detriment to product-led growth. More on this later.

A Service Design Map (or Service Blueprint) captures both the “front stage” and “back stage” of the user experience — meaning it also details what the employee experience is, and what the enabling capabilities and technology systems are.

An Experience map is typically used before you even start designing a product. It focuses on a higher-level understanding of human behavior in order to achieve a particular goal within problem space (or generally).

Again, it’s not supposed to factor in your product or service or get specific about customers. Theoretically, an Experience map helps a company like yours understand how potential customers have solved their problems as people, before your product. The Experience Map helps you identify opportunities in your product design to improve those experiences, and enables you to provide distinct value in the marketplace.

An Experience Map can also be used to diagnose problems in an underperforming product or service, improving metrics, like your NPS for example, or your System Usability Scale.

This all sounds pretty useful, yes? The problem is that the Experience Map as often conceived is more about optimizing existing product or service experiences than rethinking them. There’s nothing wrong, of course, with looking to improve an existing product or service. It’s just a different effort than what I’m talking about. Any experience with your brand should reinforce that you know your customers better than any competing solution.

Experience Maps can better support Product Experience-Led Growth

As I’ve noted, the point of the Experience map is to be agnostic to any organization or product, including yours. After all, it’s often used before you even start designing a product. People might not rely on any organization or product right now to address the problem as they see it.

But it’s tempting for teams to ignore this point and view the building of the Experience Map as if these were your customers and your product anyway. I think largely that’s because they find themselves without a structure or narrative to drive their research and findings without tying it back to the so-called purchase journey. And there’s always the pressure of delivering something “actionable” as quickly as possible.

This causes two problems:

• One, it draws attention away from more intense secondary research into customers as people first and the development of powerful insights into human nature — the enabler of real innovation and compelling communications.
• Two, the approach might incorporate a lot of common myths and assumptions that are unproven, or even have been disproved, by marketing research out there by people a lot smarter than me. Let’s go through these.

Step 1. Create personas. Nope.

The danger here is engaging in marketing-style customer segmentation and demographics rather than identifying user behaviors and motivations that any of us might exhibit at any point during a product experience, regardless of our demographic or favorite wine or the kinds of shows we binge.

This danger includes the trap of believing you are designing experiences that target generational differences — from what I’ve seen, generational differences don’t exist as far as academic research is concerned.

Step 2. Define customer stages. Nope.

Too often this is confused with the marketing-oriented purchase journey — which is flat-out wrong, BTW, but refuses to die. This SHOULD be about how people try to solve the problem now (if they do try or maybe they just work around it, or live with it) and what barriers they run into in their efforts.

Step 3. Define customer interactions. Maybe?

This can be too soon in the discovery phase of the work. One because, again, it assumes products or services out there are the solution when there may not be any. Two, it focuses your attention and efforts on the Status Quo, which then leads you to Optimizing that Status Quo — distracting you from the greater question: Is anyone solving for the Right Problem in the first place?

Step 4. Conduct primary research. Nope.

The kinds of deep human truths that can surface during this work are not ones that need to be validated by focus groups or customer one-on-ones. We’re in the realm of science and medicine, philosophy and the Arts, here. Let’s stand on the shoulders of those giants for a time and see what that view gets us.

We have a tendency as creators and designers — a tendency often driven by client or management pressure — to move quickly into “user interviews” as quickly as possible, as if this is when the “real work” begins. Too often a rushed secondary research phase results in so-called insights that are no different than the insights uncovered by those who came before, particularly competitors.

Deep secondary research enables us to ask smarter, more interesting, questions when it is time for primary research, leading to surprising answers that enable us to challenge the status quo, and ideally, through small experiments work your way toward something special and something you.

In my next installment, I’ll recommend how we can evolve the Experience Map and improve secondary research to provide more powerful insights into customers as people first, providing a powerful foundation for your Product Experience-Led growth strategy.

• *While I’ve drawn on my own experience in defining these tools, I want to shout out and recommend Adobe’s helpful article as a reference.
• Note: This article is based on my new Growth Brand Framework video series. You can find all current videos at at www.daleconour.com