483: Nailing the customer experience to improve product value – with Jason Friedman

How product managers can design their customer experience journey We all want to create products that customers find valuable and even delightful. But accomplishing that is complicated, and some teams lose focus on the real objective or start without a clear vision for what they need to accomplish. How can using the customer experience journey help you make better products? We are about to find out with Jason Friedman. Jason has started successful businesses in several industries including medical diagnostics, automotive, spirits, and digital media. He has taken his experience and knowledge and focused it to help companies gain an unfair advantage over their competition through the art and science of designing their “customer experience journey.” He is founder and CEO of CXFormula™, which works with entrepreneurs to Fortune 100 companies including Nike, Universal Studios, Burger King, Bank of America, and others. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:26] What is the customer experience journey? The customer experience journey is the perception that a customer has after interacting with your product, service, brand, and team. The most important piece is how people feel. Today the customer experience journey is more important than it ever has been. Today, AI has dominated everything, so people can create a new product or idea in minutes. Where we shine as product managers is in the experience people have with our product. We can make it amazing, and that’s what differentiates us in the crowded market. [5:38] I’d like to provide two scenarios. First, sometimes startup founders develop a product to solve their own problem and assume others experience the problem the same as they do. Second, established companies can believe they are the experts in their domain and tell customers what they need. In both scenarios, the customer experience is not considered. How would you avoid these problems? The customer experience journey is all the touch points a customer has with your product, including brand, service, support, usability, and instructions. There’s that famous quote from Henry Ford, “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have told me faster horses,” and Steve Jobs has been quoted as having a similar perspective. Often, customers don’t have the vision for creating a paradigm-shifting solution. Those companies might be right that their customers don’t know, but they miss the deep understanding of their customers. When we don’t truly understand our customers and what they really need and want, we can create a product that may be awesome but that customers are not going to adopt. I don’t want to discourage anyone from thinking outside the box. If you only rely on what your customers tell you, you might miss out on coming up with some amazing innovation. But finding out how to really understand our customers and their true wants and desires is problematic for many of us. We don’t really know, so we rely on superficial information. My background is in theatre working behind-the-scenes. In theatre productions, the focus is almost exclusively on the audience—the customer. Everything we do on stage is about the customers’ reaction. In our businesses, we often lost sight of the customer. A business owner who built a product for themselves might have been the customer at one point, but often they have the curse of knowledge. They know too much and lost sight of where their customers are. They might overdevelop or create something that’s not aligned with the customers’ true needs. One of the tricks is to get inside the customer’s head. Pretend like you’re going to play your customer on stage as a character. Get into character. Many famous actors use method acting. They go deep in understanding that character so much so that they know what...