WorkMatters #312

⚙️ Design better products with Product-Led Customer Experience

NOTE: The scheduled deep-dive into Economic Engagement meant to close out our series on management spans and self-organization continues… at a later date ;-)

Hi [NAME],

I'd like to tell you about a new product design framework I'm developing. It's a work in progress, but far enough along that I am using it with customers and with good results. I'm calling it PLCX — short for Product-Led Customer Experience — because (1) it's built atop Product-Led Growth (PLG) and (2) it takes a holistic approach more akin to Customer Experience Management (CXM) than traditional User Experience (UX).

Product-Led Origins

I've written about PLG before (see #105 and #115) but in short: PLG is a go-to-market strategy in which customer acquisition, conversion, and retention is driven not by sales and marketing, which is traditionally the case, but via a 'growth engine' designed and built into the product itself. It's the strategy credited with rocketing companies like Slack, Dropbox, and Zoom to unicorn status.

Key Benefits

PLG originates with B2B Software-as-a-Service companies*. But I've come to appreciate the numerous ways the strategy might benefit other industries as well. There are three things that stand out as especially helpful from a design perspective, each of which forces the designer to think bigger and more strategically about what his or her design is meant to accomplish:

• From User Experience to Customer Growth: Traditional UX practices are singularly focused on the end-user's experience. This is not wrong, but it is incomplete. PLCX sees great UX as a means to an end, and that end is customer acquisition, conversion, and retention.
• From Customer Journeys to Growth Flywheels: Traditional UX practices treat the customer's journey as a linear process that starts with unmet needs and ends with said needs met. PLCX takes one step further. It sees met needs as a means to an end, and that end is advocacy and referrals.
• From User Persona to Customer Jobs-to-be-Done: Traditional UX practices build empathy by way of customer characteristics such as age, gender, and preferences. Here again PLCX takes one step further. It sees characteristics as a starting point atop which context (specifically stage of adoption) must be considered.

To date, I've used PLCX with both B2B and B2C offerings. And while I have not yet tried it with SaaS companies (oh, the irony), I have used it with several of MAQE's e-commerce customers — all with good results. Importantly, I have not yet encountered a product that I think does not benefit from the above shifts in perspective.

Invitation to Co-Create

Over the course of the next few weeks, I will try to explain in detail how PLCX works and how I've used it in past client engagements. The rationale is simply that I want feedback. I think PLCX has a lot of potential. But MAQE is a small company and I know that if we want to battle test this methodology, we'll need more people to use it. That's the goal.

Up next: a first look at the PLCX canvas!

That's all for this week.

/Andreas

*This might not be exactly true. In a recent episode of the Acquired podcast, hosts Ben and David point out that it was actually Microsoft who first put the PLG playbook to use in the 1990s, long before there were SaaS companies and long before PLG became a thing. So credit where credit is due, and all that.