Return to Why!
Maintaining your Product Vision
So, you’ve made it! Your startup is no longer struggling to pay the bills. You have record sales and have hired dozens of engineers and a hand-full of product managers. Your teams have high output and everything seems to be going good… almost.
Your support team is starting to feel the pressure of maintaining happy customers. The awesome MVP features you released have not seen much love because the product teams moved on to new, and most certainly, important features. Your product managers are focused on output but not maybe so much the outcomes. Nobody can give you quantitative data showing exactly how your customers are engaging with your current product. Something is starting to just feel off.
This is a pretty accurate description of where we found ourselves almost a year ago. We had just doubled the size of our development and product teams. The scrappy, get-it-done process that we had relied on to launch a startup, was now leading to poor documentation and lost vision. The core design decisions and drivers, the emotions (internal triggers), features (external triggers), and motivations that were once front and center to all of our product decisions had slowly become a fading afterthought. We had lost the laser focus on the why. Our key metrics were no longer being tracked or had not ever even been defined for several of our products.
This lack of focus on the core customer experience, the why, had lead to product features that were not really moving the needle. They often made no significant impact on the customer’s experience, or solving pain points in their workflow.
This shortsighted focus left our long term strategy as a second thought. We were iterating, but iteration without a detailed customer experience as your north star, is like walking in circles — you’re doing work, but not getting any closer to your end goal. We needed to find a better way to maintain our product vision, to keep the design decisions, emotions, motivations and key success metrics front and center.
Iterate and Learn
We began by taking a hard look at our processes and then iterating with several combinations of popular discovery techniques, like jobs to be done and journey mapping, mixed with our Spotify model for discovery and development. None of them individually, or even used simultaneously, provided a complete story that was meaningful, actionable and yet still light on the documentation side. Something document heavy would not be maintainable, and we wanted something that could be maintained and referenced for the life of the product.
Our goal was an ambitious one. We not only wanted a discovery document, but a tool that could be used by marketing, design, UX and even engineering as a product source of truth. It would anchor the product’s why and provide key insights to bounce design, engineering and future enhancement decisions against. The bottom line is that this tool would help stakeholders deepen their understanding of their customers’ pain, behaviors, motivations, and feelings across touch-points in their journey and make them actionable. It needed to clearly define the why and the metrics to validate that our solution addressed and continues to address the customer’s core pain.
Experience Map
After months of working with different product brief templates, product launch guides, go to market lists, and several tracking tools, we finally decided to create our own tool. Taking inspiration from the key components of several of the methods and tools we had experimented with, we consolidated them down into one light weight product brief.
The final result is what we call a Customer Experience Map. It has become instrumental to maintain our product vision, to keep track of the design decisions and drivers, the emotions, features, motivations and key success metrics of our products. It is the keystone to all initial and future discovery and development. It anchors the “why” for every new feature that is added and guides our discovery process, the engineering build and continued maintenance of our products.
This has been a fundamental change to our product process, and has given us a light weight, but powerful tool that has produced fruits time and time again even in the short time we have had it integrated into our process. It guides the product managers through key discovery steps and leads them all the way through the generation of the accompanying success metrics.
One of the keys to success for us, was to make the experience maps accessible and visible, to the entire company. Our product wall is a work in progress, but it has been a great way of keeping important info available to everyone. Who knew how cool custom magnetic clipboards could be!
I wanted to share our current iteration of our experience map, hoping you will find value in a tangible example. It is definitely a work in progress, but has become such a central part of our team’s workflow, that I wanted to share it. Here is the template in all of its google spreadsheet glory: Experience Maps
And here is the TL;DR:
You get What You Measure
Quarter after quarter, one of the hardest things to do is to continually keep an eye on the key product metrics of existing products. So much gets lost in the post-release scramble and desk cleaning that occurs after a large feature release. Without the right documentation you risk losing sight of what really matters to your customers. You can only improve what you measure, so don’t let your key metrics get lost in the shuffle.
Experience maps will provide long term focus and help your teams keep track of the design decisions, the emotions, features, motivations and key metrics that will continue to drive your customer happiness.
Conclusion
A product vision is not a short term strategy that is one-and-done, but rather, it is a long term approach with carefully constructed solutions to customer problems. Having a Customer Experience Map as a north star will reduce wasted cycles and allow you to continue to innovate, iterate and to maintain your core products and vision.
You built it and they came. Now stick tight to your vision, and keep them coming back!
The core tenants of many of the steps in our Experience Map are worth studying, and they deserve a lot more detail then I have provided here. I highly recommend watching Nate Walkingshaw’s Mind The Product presentation and reading Dutt’s thoughts on product analytics and measurement, Clayton Christensen’s Jobs to be Done, and watching an intro to Spotify’s development model (Spotify engineering culture (part 1) | Labs & Spotify engineering culture (part 2) | Labs).
Go change the world one customer experience at a time!
