The Experience is the Product

In this talk from Mind the Product San Francisco 2016, Peter Merholz, one of the founders of Adaptive Path, argues that we tend to forget the experience is the product we deliver. Every technical product category has followed the same path: from technology for its own sake, to a feature war, to an experience. Mobile phones went from early Nokia smartphones to feature-packed devices before the iPhone made the category about experience; chat went from IRC through HipChat and Jive to Slack.

Merholz suggests that user experience exists as a field partly because product management wasn’t doing its job, and that the UX part of product management is often too small. After going in-house at Groupon, he saw too little design thinking, strategic alignment and customer understanding. His conclusion: good design practice is good product management practice. Spending time to make sure an idea is the right one may slow the first release, but gets you to your best release sooner.

He describes a digital product as a user experience wrapped around business logic wrapped around data, and warns against designing from the inside out. Products and features are a manifestation of a service relationship, so teams should be organised around customers and their experiences rather than around features.