Clearly most enterprises recognize customer experience is important. Yet only 22% of customer experience leaders polled in the Gartner study believed they were outperforming in the eyes of their customers. According to PwC, over half of US consumers (54%) still feel their experiences with most companies need improvement. 



Another study commissioned by Microsoft, zeroing in on financial services in Australia, found over 80% of firms had experienced the failure of customer experience projects, and that 40% felt as many as 20-40% of such projects fail – often with a hefty price tag attached. So why is creating an effective experience such a struggle?

Product thinking principles

Development doesn’t stop 

At its core, product thinking involves a shift from the traditional approach to development, where software or products are built to order and ‘handed off,’ to a more expansive, holistic process, defined by continuous ownership and improvement. 

“Modern technology organizations or product teams have moved away from a project mindset, where teams are handed down requirements to build a piece of software, get it done and then hand it off to a separate operations team to maintain it,” says Hollier. “Instead, they adopt product thinking, where teams are empowered to own a product end-to-end throughout its lifecycle, from envisioning and discovery through to delivery, and optimization or evolution based on customer feedback. Product thinking recognizes that digital experiences deliver value to customers in the same way that physical products and services do, so they need to be continually enhanced and refreshed to stay competitive.” 



Before the product itself comes design - meaning effective product thinking begins with design thinking. In fact, according to Sulistio, “product and design thinking overlap. Design thinking is really about allowing the space to explore problems and find solutions through a process of free and uninhibited inquiry - being able to understand the customer by taking on the perspective of the customer. Product thinking extends beyond that to defining how to deliver, build and shape that product, launching it into the market, and collecting and directing continuous feedback, even if it challenges our understanding of what we may know of the customer - and in doing that, unlocking new possibilities of delivering value.”

There’s no better way to get this perspective than requiring everyone involved in the product cycle - from designers to those in the C-suite signing off on development budgets - to at least occasionally serve on the front lines and take on some form of direct customer interaction. 



“There are companies where every executive has to work one day a month in the call center,” Abbett says. “Right there on the frontline with other employees, taking calls, they develop empathy for the end-user and gain a better understanding of their customer’s needs, or the problems they face. It gives executives a firsthand, human-to-human view that can be very insightful.” 

Build for real-world problems 



Understanding customers gives the enterprise visibility over the problems they face. According to Abbett, designing and building to address those problems is the best way to keep development anchored to the experience of the end user, and to ensure a product’s eventual success.

“The challenge a lot of companies have is that engineers are trained to have solutions,” he says. “Effective design in general is about identifying the problem, and a good solution is quite often humanity-focused from the start. Figure out what you’re trying to solve for, what the outcome should be and then the potential solution - whether it’s code, more people, or something else altogether.” 

Applying the right resources to a customer problem can be a delicate art - particularly given the tendency among many enterprises to institute a technology solution or feature where it may not be necessary or relevant, out of a misplaced effort to keep pace with peers.

“Whenever an industry leader is doing something, it becomes table stakes that other companies are expected to do,” notes Hollier. “It’s hard for organizations to keep up with the pace of technology innovation, but at the same time there’s a lot of tech for tech’s sake. For example, a common pitfall we see is companies wanting to build the same user experience as their existing website on a new medium like voice or mobile, rather than actually realizing the power of that medium and the context of how it’s being used - then designing a new experience accordingly.” 

The goal, in other words, should be to “build the right thing,” as well as to “build the thing right.” 

Similarly, if a company is looking to leverage an emerging technology like augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) to enhance customer experience, “how you use the technology has to be deliberate and intentional, not just for the sake of having something fancy that in reality isn’t meaningful for the customer or driving value,” Sulistio says. 



The most successful recent use cases she has seen are in retail and food and beverage in China, where AR, robotics, and AI technology have been used to create highly immersive digital experiences in physical stores or restaurants - from AR playing a role in educating the customer about the brand, its history, and the optimal way to enjoy its products; to robotics capable of creating and serving cocktails in a distinctive, memorable way.  

“If you take a traditional IT organization and simply rebrand it as ‘digital’ when they haven’t worked in that way before, they may not have the product and design capabilities that are needed,” she says. “That means the customer experience suffers. They might be building new digital products with terrible UI (user interfaces). Or they don’t have strong product management, so there’s no one looking at the roadmap, the analytics, making trade-off decisions and prioritizing. If executives are just telling teams what to build there’s a lot of anxiety and roadmaps can be long, leading to bloated products with a lot of features that aren’t being used.” 



“The best product teams are outcome rather than output driven, and that sometimes requires a new operating model that focuses on prioritizing value rather than rewarding for the number of features or products launched into the market,” agrees Sulistio. 

“Teams need to be autonomous, to own an area where they can release to customers in the market or internal users, get feedback with analytics and user research, and because they own their product roadmap, iterate and evolve the product based on that,” Hollier adds. “They need to be able to move quickly and independently, not wait on 16 other teams to do things before they can get something out and tested.” 



The other critical ingredient for successful team-building is a sense of “psychological safety,” says Abbett. “That means if I have an idea, I feel safe bringing it up.”     

Teams may be ‘led’ by a product manager but according to Abbett the role is no longer about “someone cracking a whip.” Product managers are increasingly called on to serve as lines of communication with the business and the customer; to distil client or internal feedback into calls to action; and to identify the next big business opportunity. 

“If you’re a product manager you’re not just thinking about the product, but also about the marketing, the sales, working with engineering to improve it,” Hollier says. “It’s almost like a mini-CEO, or business leader. You have to be entrepreneurial about it.” 

For product teams to be effective, it’s also important that the enterprise removes obstacles in their path. The most common bottlenecks product teams face are bureaucratic. 

“Often they’re slowed down by things that are outside their control,” notes Sulistio. “How the organization operates, how budgeting and prioritization happens, how they have to respond to requirements from the business.” 

This means expanding the team to encompass, or at the very least communicating with, non-core functions that may be involved in the approval or sale of a product - such as legal, marketing, or customer support - so their concerns or requirements are addressed early. This is one of the biggest steps enterprises can take to promote a more seamless approach to development.

The secrets to scaling success 

Typically, creating a single team isn’t difficult; nor is creating a small number of teams focused on a single product. But this isn’t a viable place to stop for enterprises that may be dealing with dozens or hundreds of products and services, and needing to create experience at scale. The challenge is building up to tens or hundreds of teams that work autonomously yet are also to some extent coordinated. 

“A lot of times companies understand how product innovation works in a greenfield setting, if it’s just one product or app,” Hollier says. “But when it comes to the enterprise setting, where you have legacy technology you need to integrate with, and all these other touchpoints where the brand experience needs to be consistent, and a sales or legal department that has issues with you getting out and testing things, there’s much more complexity that you have to figure out how to deal with.” 

“Where things can start to break down is when you have multiple parts of the organization delivering ideas to market without a unified vision of the customer experience, and a commitment to consistency in value proposition and design principles,” agrees Sulistio. “There can often be a lot of waste and rebuilding of the same things over and over again, in different parts of the organization, before getting it right” 

Product thinking at scale requires the management of an entire innovation portfolio, as well as a constant backlog of ideas, with repeatable approaches to experimentation and the ability to dynamically allocate funding where needed, Hollier says. The only way to meet these needs is with a technological platform, infrastructure and design system that enable multiple teams to deliver products to market using (and re-using) the same basic technology foundations and design components.  

“It’s not just about creating multiples of the product team or startup model, but putting in place the supporting automation, infrastructure and analytics, and processes that support that at scale,” she explains. 

“Where we’ve seen product at scale working really well is having that platform thinking, building the platform foundation for multiple front ends and the quick innovation of products using the same middle layer of capabilities across the entire organization,” says Sulistio. 

Providing a consistent technology, process and design foundation for teams to draw from not only reduces redundancy and waste; it also minimizes technical debt and friction, and enhances speed, experience and quality.  

Sulistio cites the example of a global carmaker ThoughtWorks worked with in China, where it knew it would have to adopt different approaches than those employed in other markets. 

“When we first started, we were helping [our client] be a digital leader through delivering and launching products at impressive speeds that were specially designed for the Chinese market, from e-commerce to after-sales digital experience and even services beyond car ownership,” she recalls. “But over time, as we saw the rise of ‘super-apps’ in China and how customer behaviors had shifted, we began to pivot our approach.” 

“We designed and delivered an experience where customers could access all services within the client’s ecosystem through a single touchpoint. And we were able to do so by leveraging the platform approach, where front-end teams could start up very quickly and use shared capabilities in the platform without having to build it themselves within their product silos.”