Here’s How Product Teardowns using Customer Journey Maps can Transform Your Product
As a product manager, have you mapped the customer journey for your product? How often you have done a product teardown for your own product?
Wondering why I am asking this? Most aspiring product managers share umpteen user research, journey mapping, and product teardowns done for hackathons and projects on social media. However, I see more and more student spirits experiencing a slow death in the professional world — all sucked up by the processes, deadlines, hierarchy…!
The entire organization must understand the user's needs and work together towards a common goal. However, it is observed that despite conducting user research and sharing it with all stakeholders, organizations fail to accomplish a satisfactory outcome. Often, the research findings are not effectively used — forget the integration with agile and development processes!
Customer Journey Maps
Customer journey maps concisely and visually put together the empathy maps, storyboards, touchpoints, customer emotions, pains, and the resulting action in a sequential format for a particular user persona. It depicts the relationship a customer shares with the organization over a period.
Journey mapping — a holistic approach
Of the many user research methods used by product managers, customer journey mapping is an underutilized one. Product managers gather data from the analytics platforms, heatmaps, etc which is quantitative. However, these are often looked at in a piecemeal fashion and lack at conveying customer emotions and frustrations. Customer journey maps can get together all the quantitative and qualitative data from user interviews — in an interesting story format, to dish out actionable insights for implementation.
Top 5 reasons product managers must participate in customer journey mapping
Often, customer journey mapping is thought to be the UX/Marketing responsibility in an organization. So, why should product managers participate in mapping customer journeys?
- Customer journey maps help develop empathy by improving customer understanding. Understanding the customer is the cornerstone of work done by an ideal product manager.
- Those with empathy towards the customers end up making better products.
- Product managers are the voice of customers.
- Product managers drive the various verticals involved in the product — design, development, marketing, sales, and strategy.
- Product managers often bridge the communication gap between leadership and product stakeholders.
Top 5 benefits of customer journey mapping
- Journey maps expose customer experience gaps or overlays in the product and processes.
- Journey maps help identify which channel, product nudges, push notification, promotional offers, etc. are working/not working.
- Journey maps bring to light ways to introduce personalization.
- Journey maps can be appended to product roadmaps, thus helping align all the teams.
- Journey maps make the organization, the team and the product more empathetic and customer-centric.
What is the process for mapping customer journeys?
Customers interact with your product via multiple touchpoints throughout the awareness-to-retention lifecycle. Hence, it is important that journey mapping is not done in silos but alignment with all the teams. Product managers can initiate a 60 to 90-minute stakeholder-wide activity periodically (say every quarter — to align with the product roadmap). Ensuring that the actionable insights see the light of implementation keeps the motivation high.
Product Teardown
Product Teardown — an act of critically evaluating the product from the concerned user’s perspective to gather new actionable insights for improvement on the current product.
Product teardown can use customer journey mapping as a way to derive invaluable actionable insights for improving an existing product. It helps create a strong foundation and prevents user research underutilization. It is a collection of end-to-end product journeys accessible to all members of the organization. A product teardown can especially benefit new startups which are about to/have just reached product-market and need to scale.
Please share in the comment on how do you perform product teardowns? Which user research method do you use for the same?
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