Strategizing Products and Customer Experiences (SPACE)

Your Entire Business Revolves Around Customer and User Experiences

SPACE teaches models and approaches for a small or large business transformation back to high quality products and services that meet and exceed customers’ real needs. How can we better strategize, prioritize, and make the right decisions around the products and services our current and potential customers need?

We’ll look at what customer-centricity is, what blocks us from being more user-focused, and how we can start creating change.

Roughly half of the workshop time is spent in exercises that are in a Miro board. You’ll need a computer but you won’t need a Miro account.

Key Takeaways:

• Highly actionable models, maps, and processes empower everyone to improve the Customer Experience (CX).
• Learn what blocks teams and companies from being more customer-centric.
• Gather customer and user evidence and data that better inform decisions, leading to increased satisfaction, conversion, and loyalty.
• Use our governance model for implementing and monitoring the progress, success, and failure of internal process changes and experiments.

Longer description for those who like more detail:

SPACE is a unique workshop focusing on customer-centricity, product strategy, and improving team processes to be more efficient while making fewer mistakes. Cutting risk and waste. Improving customer attraction, satisfaction, and retention. A bit of change management and a governance model for overseeing changes and experiences in how we work.

It differs from most product strategy and product management courses because those tend to be the opposite of customer-centric. They might claim that you will create something users need, but if that message exists at all, it’s overshadowed by training and exercises that put the business and what it wants first. Impact maps, opportunity solutions trees, and other plans and maps put the business need front and center, and sometimes don’t even include the customers’ perspectives or needs.

Users and customers are treated as pawns we push around to achieve business goals. Researching users is treated as wasteful or optional as we burn time and money to guess solutions to guessed-at problems. We are slow, reactive, and operating on a lot of risky guesses and assumptions.

And you can tell. Think about all the crappy crap you use all day. You’re not fooled. You know when there was little or no thought about who you are or how you might use whatever it is. You can tell when a team released what they thought was “good enough” or “minimally viable.”

Every day, teams release things they know are broken, flawed, have to be fixed later (do we ever fix it later?), and wrong for customers. We must have pretty low standards to ship things we already know need to be fixed. Do our customers see this as 5 stars out of 5 greatness? If not, what are we doing? We can call this “product-led” but it’s not customer-centric nor is it value-led, leading with the value we should constantly create for customers.