Experience Centered verse Product Centered
January 25, 2019
Gina Trapani at Postlight wrote a fantastic article about personal finance apps and the gaps they fail to solve. The thesis being:
The problem with these birds-eye view, dashboard apps is that you have to connect all your accounts to them. They download all your transactions, and boom—they know a lot of things about you. A lot. Your salary, your credit card balances, whether you have kids, how much doggie daycare cost, how many times a month you order from Seamless or get a Lyft, how bad your Amazon habit really is. And in return you get… charts.
Gina ends the piece by saying:
Off the top of my head, here are a few insights I’d love to get from my money management app:
- It’s December 1st! If you donate X dollars to tax-deductible charities by the end of the month, you’ll save Y dollars on your income tax in April.
- Hey, it looks like you’ve got some tax-advantaged accounts that you haven’t maxed out. Consider transferring X dollars sitting in your savings account right now to your IRA before April 15th.
The entire article reminded me of the famous quote by Theodore Levitt that goes like:
People don’t want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole
Which leads into Jobs to Be Done. It’s a simple belief, someone hires a service to do a job.
Gina’s post covers gaps only a new product could fill. But at any company Customer Success can think like this to fill existing gaps.
For example, it’s not unusual for a service’s welcome email series to center on Do X and Y in the product! … Configure this feature.
But what if a welcome series is experience driven? That shifts the focus from what one should do in a service to what a service allows one to do. That’s their desired outcome.
While thinking about the experience, think about the customer’s state of mind. If a service is for marketers, don’t only think about onboarding flow. Think: what is the complete experience moving to a new marketing tool like?
Best of all, experience thinking requires talking to customers to understand their motivations. And it creates compassionate empathy for understanding their current situation.