What is product experience?
Product experience describes the entire journey a customer has within the product. It starts with the first login and continues through to the last time they use the application. It is a broader, more end-to-end view of user experience, which refers to specific interactions a person has within a product.
Focusing on product experience allows companies to deliver more value to customers and to increase their lifetime value. A good product experience is the key factor that drives product differentiation. It plays a crucial role in achieving lasting customer satisfaction, often measured through CSAT and NPS. Additionally, a positive product experience fosters customer loyalty. Bad product experiences increase customer frustration, potentially creating resentment around having difficulty completing tasks within an application and increasing customer churn.
Product experiences should guide your team in educating and encouraging customers at every stage of their relationship with your brand. This includes onboarding, feature adoption, expansion and growth, product planning, and long-term retention. It is crucial to maintain a regular cadence of listening to and acting on customer feedback throughout this journey.
Here are six steps to take to improve your product experience.
6 ways to improve your product experience
1. Socialize the concept of product experience
Product experience as a focus is relatively new. As with any new initiative, ensure that you and your teammates align your understanding to prevent miscommunication. Before starting, make sure everyone is on the same page. Once you identify the stakeholders, engage them in discussions about their perspectives on the current experience and any changes they would suggest.
After you’ve socialized your ideas, it’s time to set time for a formal kickoff. Beforehand, make sure your team aligns on:
- Their definition of product experience
- The goals you hope to achieve by investing in product experience
- The metrics you’ll use to measure success
2. Define product experience ownership
Product, engineering, and design teams own core product functionality, UX, and design experiences. But product experience requires a company-wide effort that includes customer-facing teams like customer success, marketing, and account management. No matter your company setup, it’s important to clearly define ownership and alignment across departments during goal setting.
When you decide to master your product experience, represent all customer-facing functions. For example, when you release a new feature, the product team may decide to increase awareness through a broadly targeted in-app Note. A broadly-targeted approach may not yield the most effective results. The customer success team has deeper insights into which customers will benefit most from the feature. Meanwhile, the marketing team can focus on targeting customers at the top of the funnel. Additionally, the account management team can use the new feature as an opportunity for upselling.
Every customer-facing team needs a seat at the table when it comes to product experience to ensure it’s as powerful as it can be. Consider how this translates to your team by running through simulations in your early planning sessions.
3. Measure your progress
Successful product-led growth requires analytics to back it up. Without measuring success, you risk relying on the opinions of the loudest stakeholders to guide your progress. This approach could lead to decisions unsupported by data. To ensure a product experience driven by objective insights, it’s essential to base your decisions on measurable success metrics.
Consider tracking metrics in the following areas to guide your decisions:
- User path analysis to track unexpected flows, learn how people arrive at new features, and understand adoption paths
- Churn analysis to understand where customers fall off from completing critical tasks within your application
- Adoption analysis to identify points of strong/weak feature adoption and upsell opportunities
- Retention analysis to validate your product roadmap, gauge how long it takes customers to find value, and set benchmarks for long-term retention goals
4. Gather and act on customer feedback
Customer feedback is the foundation for all product-led growth strategies. Analyzing feedback looks different for every business depending on what questions are asked and where it’s collected, and far too many businesses collect customer feedback and then let it sit. However, the feedback you collect is only as good as how you process it and act on it.
To maintain a regular pulse on feedback, create effective feedback loops that seamlessly integrate into your product experience. Design these loops to align with customer needs by making them quick, non-intrusive, and optimized for any device they use, especially mobile devices. You can do this through in-app surveys, one-to-one messages, targeted notes, and tracking real-time shifts in sentiment.
Although it may seem like product managers solely own customer feedback, it actually impacts your entire organization. Understanding what customers want is valuable for marketers, product managers, customer success managers, and everyone in between. It’s important to share these insights with all stakeholders across your organization to ensure everyone benefits from this knowledge. Make sure all product experience stakeholders are invested in understanding customer feedback and taking action on the results.
5. Scale with your mobile product
The best product experiences grow with the technologies they’re built to support. As you add new features, pivot your product direction, and release new developments, remember to adjust your experience plans and goals alongside the changes.
One way to ensure your product experience scales with your mobile product is to ruthlessly prioritize your product roadmap. Prioritize combating feature creep and setting realistic expectations. Align the right teams around your vision and translate that vision into actionable steps. The more organized your product task list is, the more time and resources you can allocate to enhancing your product experience.
6. Promote product-led growth
Product-led growth is a business methodology in which user acquisition, expansion, conversion, and retention are all driven primarily by the product itself. It fosters company-wide alignment across teams, including engineering, sales, and marketing. By uniting these teams around the product, it positions the product as the key driver of sustainable and scalable business growth.
You can promote product-led growth by using your product experience to drive customer expansion through promoting advocacy, influencing upsells, and more. Creating a product-led organization ultimately comes down to showing how your product directly impacts growth.
Now it’s your turn
Exceptional product experiences allow companies to deliver more value to customers, build deeper customer relationships, and increase LTV. When teams adopt a cross-functional approach to supporting and improving their product experience, the results can be game changing.
As mentioned above, collecting and acting on customer feedback is the foundation to providing the best product experience possible. And the process is smoother if you can look at all of your customer feedback in one place—especially if you are able to drill down feedback to the individual consumer level, which goes one step further than looking at customer segments.
To learn more about how to tie cross-experience feedback to a central, consumer-focused point, we’d love to chat!
