Design CX
“It’s working as designed.”
Bernard is a Scottish Deerhound who acts as my office “assistant”, or my walking carpet—his alternate design.
Who did we design for?
When I hear that line I know we missed an important part of the <user> story along the way. Finding bugs is one thing. That’s the nature of product development. It’s a continuously iterative Science experiment.
The Art to creating value starts with a better discovery process. Asking your customers—and the data—better questions. Investing the time to understand the purpose.
I took the path to Product Management to deepen my understanding of the other side of the story. I’ve been the customer, the IT person, the vendor, the partner and the product person. All to find better questions that help us build better solutions together.
How do you use the product today?
What is the goal? How will you know if you get there? What value does it deliver for the customer?
What’s next?
Translating that story to the teams. Offer the user story, defined with the value and how to measure it. Then design a solution—together. This includes the product and a program to get to value.
Design with the customer at the center, the product and the program.
Since 2010,
I’ve enabled digital teams to deliver product— deeply rooted in the customer story. Crafting programs that use existing resources, process and integrations enhanced with best practices and simple solutions to drive value in primary workflows.
This reduces time to value and supercharges adoption, or AH-Adoption as I like to call it!
From Fortune 50 to start-ups, I’ve managed some of the brightest technical creatives in the industry from analysts to designers to engineers. Leading teams with focus to deliver impactful solutions with a 4.4x product adoption rate increase, scaled cross-organizationally across marketing, product, IT and support. Delivering an average annual return of 198% with a 243% return on the technical software product investment in the initial six months.
Prove your value to create space for innovation.
Build.
Better, faster, and with purpose (because maintenance, y’all). Here are some products I’ve built to grow product adoption and value at scale:
In-product platform Help resources
Support—reduced! (just ask my friend, Jen Berg)
Easier navigation and interactive tutorials
Online certification and goal-based learning paths for everyone
Class is always in session.Community of practice
Listen to the data story.
Components are built for use in multiple places. You may not know the additional use cases out there for a feature. Ask how the customer uses it. And read the data story.
Share.
A long, long time before you release a feature… find the story. Follow it all the way through, ship it, share it, and learn from it. Be open, kind, and curious. Repeat.
The Maths behind CX.
This took me literal decades to pivot and unlock. I want to share CX with your teams. Learn more about Why CX works.