Product Management in an Experience Led World

Product Management plays a crucial, central role in the Experience-Led Organisation, facilitating the alignment and continuous optimisation of services and value streams. This involves building adaptable products that evolve based on user feedback and align with strategic goals and operational needs.

Product thinking is outcome focused and people centric and a defining characteristic in the Experience Led Organisation.

According to a Forrester survey, making improvements to the development ‘engine’ can have significant impact in terms of shipping digital products faster and more efficiently:

• 74% of respondents said they could drive developer productivity
• 77% can shorten time to market
• 85% can impact revenue growth
• 75% can better attract and retain customers
• 82% can increase customer satisfaction

Product Management sits at the intersection of technology (feasibility), the customer (usability) and theorganisation (value) and directly influences these statistics by guiding the teams through delivery cycles, maintaining focus on the product vision and integrating customer insight. 

Simultaneously, it draws upon the essential elements of product thinking to help power the development engine, summarised below.

Culture of Learning, Curiosity, and Experimentation 

A culture that supports continuous learning and experimentation is vital for the Experience Led Organisation. Product Management encourages teams to engage deeply with problems, experiment incrementally while staying true to the vision. It plays a key role in encouraging psychological safety, enabling teams to challenge assumptions and dearly held beliefs to prioritise and iterate effectively.

Product Strategy 

Product strategy, closely tied to business strategy, focuses on specific problems aligned with organisational ambitions,helping cut through the noise, prioritise activity and shorten time to market. Product teams must understand both business and user need to ensure strategic alignment and regular incremental value delivery.

Focus on Customers/Users/Beneficiaries 

Understanding and meeting user needs is central to product thinking. Teams should segment users, practice empathy, and observe user behaviours to gain deep insights.

It’s all too easy to focus on the customer only, but all users’ experience have a bearing on the overall success of an organisation’s vision – whether those users are customers, back-office support users or developers in the digital delivery teams. Maintaining the right balanced view on each user’s needs ensures clarity of purpose, driving down the chance of wasting time building things not aligned to the desired outcomes.

Ecosystem Awareness and Systems Thinking

Product Management plays a significant role in piecing together external technology, partner and competitive landscapes, frameworks, internal systems, process and politics. The layering of this into the interconnected nature of customer, service and developer experience helps to balance speed, efficiency and innovation within the problem space and speed up time to market and product/market fit. 

Entrepreneurial and Commercial Focus 

Teams must understand product economics to create sustainable value whether it for private or public sector (or both). This involves understanding market opportunities, managing costs, and ensuring scalability. Working small, aligned to value-stream goals, cycling quickly, mitigates the risk of budget overruns and increases the chance of incremental and sustainable return on investment.

Consideration and Utilisation of Diverse Perspectives 

Diverse perspectives are crucial for building the right products. Teams should actively seek insights from various disciplines, creating environments where challenging assumptions is the norm. Regular sharing and reevaluating the context in which products and services operate are key practices, enabling the development of the most appropriate solution for positive customer and organisational outcomes.

Multi-Horizon Thinking for Sustainable Growth

Long-term strategic planning, linked to organisational goals, is essential. Product teams should balance short-term flexibility with long-term outcomes ensuring that progress is maintained towards strategic ambitions.

Evidence-Oriented Approach

Using evidence to support decision-making is critical. Organisations need the tools and capabilities to understand product performance, user behaviours and team effectiveness. Balancing quantitative and qualitative evidence, setting meaningful KPIs, and avoiding vanity metrics are key practices.

In the Experience-Led Organisation, the product manager is user obsessed, so the most relevant measures will berooted in user behaviour, however understanding, managing and optimising acrossa range of measures is vital to ensure that iterations to the product are done with quick, relevant and stable change, for example; 

The following is a (non-exhaustive) list of typical tracked measures to ensure delivery of the best product or service outcomes.

Quantitative measures:

• Session duration
• Click through rate
• Feature adoption
• Time to value

Understanding the users' needs:

• Customer feedback and reviews
• Focus group insights
• Customer support and service interactions
• UX research

Understanding team performance -velocity and stability:

• Deployment Frequency
• Mean Lead Time for Changes
• Mean Time to Recover
• Change Failure Rate

Empathy and Understanding 

Empathy for users and colleagues is vital in high-performing organisations. Clear communication, alignment around shared purposes and genuine care among team members support valuable outcomes. This is a superpower that enable the Experience-Led Organisation to thrive and sustainably deliver beyond expectations.

High-Quality Decision-Making at Pace 

Empowering teams to make decisions based on evidence and context is crucial. This approach requires organisational design shifts and leadership behaviours supporting distributed decision-making. Clarity of purpose, defined guardrails and ensuring competence are essential for effective decision-making.

Outcome-Centric Focus 

Being outcome-centric ensures a focus on achieving meaningful results for users' and value creation for the organisation, not dogmatic pursuit of predefined deliverables. Product teams should continuously engage with stakeholders, reassess success measures, whilst adapting to changing contexts.

Conclusion 

There are many aspects to delivering product experiences that are valuable, iterative and adaptable within the Experience-Led Organisation and the obvious role of Product Management might be described as understanding how to discover products that are valuable, usable and feasible. This could be considered a narrow definition of ‘product’!

As has been outlined, ‘product thinking’ is the goal and there are many integrated elements to this that cut across roles and responsibilities. It remains the role of the product manager to be the glue that sticks these elements together – the oil in the engine! It is however the more important role of leaders at every level of the Experience-Led Organisation to bring these difficult, nuanced, messy elements together to uncover the compounding effects of great; processes, practices and behaviours that create positive impacts for all!

Our Product Management ethos at Axiologik is not a purist approach based on customer-user segmentation – our more holistic approach means that our product managers are also technically aware of and account for, how their product decisions are interwoven into the overall experience of everyone involved in the product lifecycle, internal users, change professionals, engineering and operations users and so on.