The two smart pieces of Amazon’s approach to product development
@Peterme pointed out this great Q&A thread on Quora on “What is Amazon’s approach to product development and product management?”
There’s two great ideas here that I push all the time with clients, internally at Adaptive Path, and when I teach and speak:
- Working backwards — working backwards from the customer rather than starting with a product then trying to make it acceptable to customers. I call this an “outside-in” approach, working from the customer’s perspective back into the business. Businesses, often for very good reasons, start with the internal systems and procedures perspective and work outward to the customer. At Adaptive Path, we try to counter this bias and work from the customer’s perspective inwards.
- Internal press releases — Amazon initiatives reportedly often start with the product manager writing an internal press release to describe the finished product. At Adaptive Path we often call this type of envisionment, a tangible future, or a [whatever]-from-the-future. That’s because these can take forms other than a press release. We’ve done blog posts, t-shirts, and posters from-the-future to help show the benefits of a successful initiative from the customer’s perspective. What they create is a clear vision for where we want to end up. Of course the final service deviates somewhat from the original vision, but everyone involved knows from the start what direction we are heading in.
Somehow, it doesn’t surprise me that Amazon’s on top of it.
designing for experiences across channels
This is some early and raw thinking I’ve been doing about designing and delivering experiences successfully across many touchpoints. Organizations are channel-bound. Customers aren’t. This outlines components and practices necessary to deliver great customer experiences across more than a single channel. With the proliferation of new screens and new moments in peoples’ lives, it’s natural for businesses to conceive of great new customer experiences that are more desirable and scalable, and therefore much more valuable to everyone. However, organizations lack the simple practices to plan, deliver, and manage a customer experience across more than one touchpoint. I’ve obviously borrowed some ideas from business strategy, service design, brand strategy, and that wacky world of design thinking. The diagram shows some of the key concepts to define and manage. The top row plans for the experience predominately from the customer’s perspective. The bottom row is — while still customer centric — taken from the perspective of what’s smart for the organization to do. The middle is the important interaction between customers and organizations that forms the experience. The value column is key to ensure the experience is viable to the business and useful to customers. The flow column defines what the experience should be. And the change column captures the means by which you can move from current state towards a better and more valuable experience. To explain ‘evidence’ in this column: showing evidence of the future experience is often the best way of helping the organization change and move towards it. For easier viewing, you can see this diagram larger or in PDF format. Note: this is somewhat a re-post of what I originally shared on Flickr, which received some interesting feedback of where some improvements can be made.
Wrapping up customer experience » for business
HBR’s February article on “Understanding Customer Experience” wraps up several thoughts on experience: how to define it, why it’s not being focused on in organizations, and how to obtain insights on experience that you can act on. Some of the interesting things authors Christopher Meyer and Andre Schwager had to say:
A definition of customer experience
They also took a swing at defining experience: “Customer experience is the internal and subjective response customers have to any direct or indirect contact with a company. Direct contact generally occurs in the course of purchase, use, and service and is usually initiated by the customer. Indirect contact most often involves unplanned encounters with representations of a company’s products, services, or brands…”
I like the emphasis on direct and indirect, as it’s easy to get obsessed with only measuring the direct touchpoints you have with customers. But I enjoyed this clarification even more: “The secret to a good experience isn’t the multiplicity of features on offer… [new paragraph] A successful brand shapes customers’ experiences by embedding the fundamental value proposition in offerings’ every feature.”
Why customer experience is hard
The recognize that experience isn’t adequately appreciated within organizations due to these factors:
- Organizations have overspent on the collection of CRM data — data about objective customer interactions like purchases or requests.
- Organizations aren’t conditioned to finding and acting on customer needs — but it’s pointed out that organizational leaders who rise through customer-facing functions are much more attuned to customer experiences.
- Organizations are fearful of the squishiness of customer experience data — data about internal, subjective perceptions are much more difficult to decipher and make decisions based on.
How to obtain and act on customer experience data
They recommend an evidence-based approach like voice-of-the-customer to making customer experience decisions (i.e., collect data, find patterns, then make decisions). This is often a cumbersome process, and should be listed as yet another reason why organizations don’t pay attention to experience.
I like that the article carefully discusses how experience is a part of many organizational functions: marketing, service operations, product development, IT, and HR. When it gets localized, the touchpoints and “customer corridors” (their term for series of touchpoints the customer uses together to create their experience) conflict and fall to pieces.
The giant gap left by the article is how to act on customer experience data. There’s some interesting ideas on how to use the data to find the most valuable or at-risk customer segments, but no thoughts on how to adapt customer touchpoints to reflect what you’ve learned.
