Why am I talking about product centricity? I think it should be dead. We all understand customer centricity (I hope) and now the contemporary thinking is about customer experience and how it cuts across all tech and marketing.
User centricity. Yes, I’m sure you’ve heard of it. I’m sure it sounded pretty obvious too.
Put our customer needs at the centre of what we do and work out from there…
Well that may have been a good starting point. And I assure you it’s very much on the bottom of the list for many organisations I’ve worked with (well it was when I started with most clients 🙂 ).
Does this sound familiar:
- product / website has been built
- now let’s ask someone to clean up the design and stick the logo on it
- Argghhhh… [sigh of death from UX person]
New products have the luxury of freedom
Bluesky thinking in regards to new digital businesses and products certainly gives freedom to rise above they tyranny of technical incumbents and entrenched systems.
But we don’t all have the freedom to jump out of bed and start a fresh new day with a clean slate. The harsh reality is so many systems or data sets or technical constraints prevent organisations from really rising above implementation constraints.
A love triangle where ‘user experience’ is hand-balled around
It strikes me that an interesting evolutionary step in the ownership of ‘customer experience’ is underway (for the last 10 years or so). I’ve seen multi-million dollar budgets being clawed away from IT departments and making their way towards marketing teams (who become the driver of technical needs). This seems to present a culture clash where ‘getting it done right (technically)’ is at odds with ‘getting it out there and being agile enough to listen and respond to the market needs’. It’s this close relationship that marketing entities have (or should have) with customers that seems to offer the potential to truly drive customer experiences; underpinning with products, data, and services from IT.
The reality is that marketing departments seem to have lacked the discipline, process, or language to ‘own’ technical projects in a manner that builds a close working culture between them and IT.
So a strange love triangle seems to have formed between product owners, product marketers, and product developers. Somewhere in between all of this the official responsibility of ‘customer experience’ has been rather fluid.
Enter User Experience consultants….
It’s no surprise then that user experience consultants have been enabling technical departments to be more customer-oriented, while also helping product owners and marketers to bridge the gap to technical teams.
In evolutionary terms it seems that customer experience will rise until there are regular roles in organisations to champion such matters.
One thing’s for sure – product centricity should be banished.
Yes, there may be arguments to say that products are the experience etc… but for the most part any product consumption has elements before, during and after that aren’t entirely provided or managed by the vendor (or even the internal department that built it). It’s important to understand the role your products play in the experience your customers expect or receive from you. It’s also about the ecosystem that it exists in.
Modelling and improving customer experiences shouldn’t start with ‘this is our product – and they will use it because they need it’.
