Think Product Experience Led Growth (part 3)
In this series, I’m explaining how what I’m calling Product Experience-Led Growth calls for raising the bar for Experience Design.
While I seem to be Experience Design heavy, this is highly relevant for all senior leaders. It 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.
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.
In my last installment, I explained why the design research tool, the Experience Map, commonly shared with leadership and internal stakeholder groups, should be utilized differently to better serve senior leadership and to support Product Experience-led growth.
In this installment, I recommend exactly how we can re-conceive the Experience Map and the role of secondary research to provide more powerful insights into customers as people first.
Let’s grow your brand!
How the Experience Map can better support Product Experience-Led Growth
Here’s how experience maps can better support Product-Experience-Led Growth.
Step 1. Conduct secondary research.
The kinds of insights into human nature and the problem space we’re looking for at this stage of the design process often have been studied and defined over hundreds, if not thousands of years by people whose names we still know. This rich secondary research should provide the foundation for much richer and more deeply insightful primary research through asking really interesting, novel, questions.
Step 2. Engage in competitive positioning to define the status quo.
You want to understand your customers better than your competitors, and have a better solution than any means they now have to address their problem. Key to having better ideas is having a unique point of view. So understand the prevailing point of view in the category. What does everyone believe to be true, what incorrect assumptions have they made, to the actual detriment of customers?
If you’re competing against incumbents, especially, you don’t want to attack them on the level of features, or cost — these can be readily addressed by them. You want to attack them at the deepest level of what they believe to be true and have based their operations on, forcing them to either transform as a business or have them at the point in which they’re unwilling to touch their business strategy.
Step 3. Define jobs to be done (all 3).
Again, not necessarily about using a product or service right now. As people, not customers, what are they trying to accomplish? What’s getting in their way?
Three jobs to be done — Functional, yes, Emotional, yes, and Social — how they want to be seen and perceived when addressing the problem space; don’t hide from this one: It ties directly into our goal of providing a meaningful experience.
For example: “I want to be seen as someone who’s self reliant and knows how to take care of my car — but the reality is I know practically nothing.” Can our product support their Social JTBD to feel and appear self reliant and car savvy?
Step 4. Identify inhibiting & promoting pressures (BeSci).
Behavioral science is finding its way into organizations through the central premise that all business is about changing behavior.
To provide a criminally truncated explanation of its approach … We want to understand what Inhibiting Pressures are keeping people from solving the problem to their satisfaction; and we want to identify what Promoting Pressures might enable them to solve the problem to their satisfaction. This takes us to ideation and experimentation and full-scale implementation — though I suggest holding off on this until later in the process.
Step 5. Discover and understand any subcultures/counter trends.
This is one of my favorite parts of research. As William Gibson famously said, “The future exists, it’s just not evenly distributed.” You are looking for the opportunity for your organization to be an agent of change — not small change, but big, interesting, super relevant change for your customers. You’ll know you’ve arrived when you uncover a group of people who have defied the status quo of the problem space to think and act a different way. Think of the impact Quantified Self enthusiasts have had on the healthcare industry in which “connected healthcare” has become a popular term and wearables are a rapidly growing market.
Subcultures not only provide a different point of view of the problem space, but often have developed their own language and behaviors to signify their distinction. I’m not going deeply into this now, but this isn’t an opportunity for you to appropriate these groups, but to explore how to become an authentic ally and supporter.
Experience Maps can better support Product Experience Led Growth
So, all this sounds like a lot of work, right?
But look, secondary research is relatively cheap. You’ve got folks hitting the books, searching the ‘Net, reading till their eyes bleed. Compare that to the business value of ensuring you’ve built a foundation of insight into how most people negotiate your problem space functionally, emotionally, and socially, and how some people are completely reframing the problem and solution, representing future change — much or all of which you may never have learned through the usual user interviews and focus groups.
Seems like a smarter way to ultimately reduce costs and grow the business than the usual “spray and pray” method companies often use when developing initiatives.
Let’s take a look at how the Experience Map might capture all this valuable knowledge.
The New Experience Map
Here’s my take on the New Experience Map. Obviously, I’m no information architect like Edward Tufte, but here’s a simplified view of what an Experience Map looks like when it reflects the results of deep research. (I’m always open to suggestions to improve the design of this, BTW.)
“Behavioral groupings” represents the likelihood you’ll find there are multiple ways to categorize people’s JTBD, pressures, and current solutions. It can be helpful to name each of these groupings, but remember to focus on these as collective attitudes, behaviors and emotions, not customer segments. There will likely be a number of rows, as is the case with the rest of this column’s headings.
“Status quo view” represents what competitors believe to be true and therefore how they position themselves. While it’s possible these will correlate with your Groupings, it’s not likely. And if it does, it only highlights the importance of creating a distinct experience through your brand, which will have to carry the day. More to come on that in the next installment.
“Counter-trend view” represents those “cultural tribes” out there who are defying the status quo and redefining how to approach the problem space.
“Opportunities” are still agnostic to your organization and potential product; they highlight the gaps between what you’ve learned, what competitors believe, and the view from subculture.
In the next installment of my Growth Brand Framework, we’ll bring all this closer to your brand and potential product. We’ll see how to explore these Opportunities through the lens of a branded experience that brings further meaningful connection between your brand and your customers.
- Note: This article is based on my new Growth Brand Framework video series. You can find all current videos at at www.daleconour.com
