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Why ‘Experience Thinking’ Should Be At The Core Of Your Business
Why ‘Experience Thinking’ Should Be At The Core Of Your Business

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“Experience thinking” is about developing solutions with the intent of giving the finest experience to the consumers.

 

No, it’s not just design thinking or product thinking, or even an exceptional custom experience. It’s a more dynamic and holistic approach, where you focus not just on the functional outcome, but also the social and emotional outcomes that you want to offer to customers at every point of contact.

 

This approach forces you to think about the end-user experience first, even before you start planning, designing or developing your product or service. It allows you to make sure you deliver that experience every single time the customer interacts with your brand.

 

This is how tremendously successful companies are able to provide truly unique offerings. Customers love how they get consistent, engaging experiences every time they interact with these brands.

 

Why limit this incredibly strong approach to customer experiences?

 

Customers have always been — and will always be — the number one priority for businesses. But in a world where we’re striving to improve business operations, extending this concept to every aspect of your business can bring in amazing results.

 

For teams that directly cater to your customers — design, documentation, sales, presales, customer service and marketing — delivering an incredible experience would be all the more difficult if the other teams — talent acquisition, employee onboarding, development, testing, project management and learning and development — don’t even care about it.

 

On the other hand, if experience thinking is adopted as a mindset and practiced by each department, providing an exceptional experience to customers won’t require any superhuman efforts. It’ll be a natural outcome of your business practice.

 

Unless your business has a system where end-to-end operations are automated, there are going to be people involved at almost every step in your business delivery. These people will determine the success of your business. I believe business owners are so obsessed with processes that they often skip a very crucial element that’s more relevant than anything else today: experience. It should permeate everything that your business does.

 

Extend experience thinking to all consumers

 

Customers are just one set of consumers. Consider extending experience thinking to all consumers, not just customers. For SaaS companies that have a microservices approach, each service is a consumer for the other service.

 

For example, if the API development team develops APIs that aren’t publicly available, the consumers are the other services or apps that the product integrates with. Adopting experience thinking would mean that the team should still develop APIs with accurate specifications for the request/response bodies, detailed documentation, error coding and more.

 

Here’s a three-step framework that can help you implement experience thinking across your organization.

 

1. Identify beneficiaries of services offered by each business function

 

It starts with identifying the direct and indirect consumers of the services offered by each team within your organization. It may sound straightforward, but you’ll be surprised at what you find when you do this activity thoroughly for all functions.

 

For some teams, some beneficiaries are already defined. For example, for the talent acquisition team, the beneficiaries are the candidates applying for a job. But when you think harder, the talent acquisition team is also responsible for delivering some kind of experience to other stakeholders, such as internal teams, recruitment partners and the candidates’ immediate families. All of these are consumers of the experiences that the talent acquisition team provides.

 

In addition, there are teams for whom consumers are never commonly defined. Take the development team, for example. For developers, the consumers would be testers, the product team and customers.

 

Do this activity for every business function you can think of. Go as granular as possible.

 

2. Define goals around experiences for these consumers

 

Experience thinking is about providing a richer, more compelling experience to every individual, group or stakeholder that you cater to. Now that you have identified each team’s consumers, work with your teams to decide how to provide a truly enriching experience for the consumers. This is the most crucial step.

 

For the talent acquisition team, for example, this could mean understanding the candidate’s values and belief system, knowing their preferences, talking to them at the most suitable times, helping them make better decisions and even minor things like giving them the best chair or setting a comfortable room temperature during the interview process.

 

Define goals that are truly focused on providing the best experiences.

 

3. Make experience thinking part of your business values

 

It isn’t unnatural to initially get responses such as: “Who does that? Why would a developer think about giving a truly exceptional experience to a tester? Why should I care about the candidate’s chair?”

 

It’s certainly difficult to implement something that’s generally unheard of. That’s why it needs to be a mindset, a culture that everyone truly believes in. And it’ll never happen without the leadership embracing it. It has to be part of the value system that the leaders define.

 

Drive experience thinking in your organization

 

Experience thinking is a mindset and a way of doing business that cascades down to the day-to-day activities of each individual. Since this could be a drastic change for most organizations, deliberate action is needed. But it needs to be started and implemented, just like any other change you would like to see in your organization.

 

This article first appeared in Forbes Technology Council blog on Nov 4, 2021.

 

About the Speaker:

Mayank Mishra: Vice President - Engineering at Contentstack

 

 

 

Mayank has over a decade of experience building software products that disrupt industries and win awards. Specializing in cloud and SaaS architectures, Mayank has deep domain expertise around digital content management systems (CMS) and was a pioneer of the CMS industry’s shift to API-first and omni-channel content management. He heads the team that established Contentstack as the leading “headless CMS”, solving complex digital problems for the world’s most prestigious brands and powering content for billions of eyeballs.


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