Why Customer Experience is at the Core of a Product Operating Model
Some leaders mistakenly view customer experience as separate from product management and a Product Operating Model. In reality, customer experience is deeply embedded within a product operating model.
Many organizations are adopting a product operating model in order to become more customer-centric. However, some leaders mistakenly view customer experience as separate from product management. In reality, customer experience is deeply embedded within a product operating model.
What is a Product Operating Model?
A product operating model is an organizational structure and way of working that aligns the company around customer-focused products instead of functional silos. Cross-functional teams own the full lifecycle of a product, from ideation to launch and ongoing iteration through to retirement. These teams are organized around and incentivized by customer-oriented KPIs and outcomes.
Some key principles of a product operating model:
Organization structured around products, not functions
Cross-functional teams that own the full product lifecycle - Autonomous teams empowered to make decisions
Customer metrics drive priorities and planning
Continuous delivery of value to customers
A focus on outcomes and fluidity to explore, innovate and experiment to find the most viable and valuable path to satisfaction
Why is it Customer-Centric?
A product operating model puts the customer front and centre in everything the organization does. Some examples:
Teams organized around products customers use, not internal functions
Customer metrics and outcomes used to measure success
Continuous research to understand changing customer needs
Delivering value frequently versus big-bang releases
Customer feedback loops to drive ongoing improvements –Aligned incentives around customer satisfaction
The entire product team - from engineers to marketers - must deeply understand the target users. Their North Star is delivering the outcomes those customers desire. This is a massive shift from a traditional functional operating model, where different departments are siloed and incentivized around their own goals. These legacy models struggle to deliver great customer experiences because they lack cross-functional collaboration, connectivity, alignment on goals, and customer empathy.
Why Customer Experience is Embedded Within Products
Some leaders make the mistake of thinking customer experience is a separate thing handled by a customer experience team. That’s not to say you don’t need customer experience, leaders, or skills in this speciality. In reality, within a product operating model, customer experience is completely embedded into how product teams operate, and you need thought leaders deeply nested in the products through to the leadership teams.
Customer experience refers to how customers interact with and perceive the product and organization. This encompasses every touchpoint along the customer journey, such as:
Discovering the product - Understanding features - Signing up
Using the product
Getting support
Renewing or increasing usage
These touchpoints cut across multiple functions - marketing, sales, product, support, etc. With a product operating model, a single cross-functional team owns the end-to-end customer experience across touchpoints for their product.
Typically, touchpoints across the customer experience journey may include:
How customers learn about the product
The signup and onboarding experience
Core product features and usability
Billing process
Customer support interactions
User engagement features
Measuring satisfaction such as NPS
Rather than customer experience being a separate silo, it is completely ingrained into how the product team operates. The engineers ensure the product is intuitive and delights users. The marketers create messaging aligned to user needs. The team jointly assesses satisfaction scores and churn metrics to identify experience improvements.
By bridging functional divides, the product team has both the insights and influence to improve the end-to-end experience rapidly. This results in much higher customer satisfaction than traditional models.
Summary:
Some leaders view customer experience as a separate initiative or function. However, within a true product operating model, it is completely ingrained into the team's day-to-day operations. Here are some key points on where customer-experience intersects with the culture and mechanisms of a Product Operating Mode :
Product teams in a product operating model own the full customer experience across touchpoints
They are aligned around and incentivized by customer outcomes
Deep customer empathy and insights drive priorities and decisions
Customer experience is not a separate function but embedded into product team workflows, albeit you will need leaders to drive this.
Removing cross-functional divides enables rapid improvements
Adopting this model is a key approach organizations can utilise to keep pace with ever-rising customer expectations.