Experience debt: the silent business growth killer

T

here’s an old joke about a lost tourist in the West of Ireland who asks a local for directions and is told: “I wouldn’t start from here”. Product managers gearing up for fresh investment and a flurry of new product releases can’t escape the same feeling: they’re starting from the wrong place.

What’s brought them here? Experience debt. So what is it, and why does it happen?

It’s the accruing of ad hoc changes made over time that lead to deep inefficiencies. It’s the gas slowly seeping around the house, with the dwellers unaware until it’s too late.

There are lots of reasons why it happens: some teams have gone through explosive growth; others might have acquired new companies, or launched a raft of new products in a short timescale. Some telltale signs are:

1. bloated websites
2. product features bolted on or added at random
3. different technical architectures
4. propositions muddied or original customer groups no longer served with clarity.

Let’s dig into a couple of scenarios in a little more detail: imagine a SaaS vendor that’s acquired some other companies over time. There’s now the same logo across all the products, and maybe the surface-level look and feel is similar.

But dig deeper, and there’s an inconsistent experience across the different products. They operate differently, the shortcuts don’t match up between one product and the other, and the products aren’t well matched to actual customer use cases. The user journey has become disjointed.

In another scenario, we’ve seen where a company launches a good version 1 of a product that was seen as a disruptor, serving a clear market. Customers like it and use it, and the product is cost effective. But over time, through a haphazard user feedback process, the product starts to bloat, with an uncomfortable mix of features. When this happens, some features start to become underused.

From the customer’s perspective, onboarding becomes a tough process, which can lead to needing to give users training because the customer starts to sense that this product has a higher degree of complexity. Once there’s an instinct that the product becomes harder to use, by definition it tends to get more expensive. So is it any wonder that customers get itchy feet and start looking around for lower cost or simpler alternatives?

Now we’re getting to why experience debt is such a problem, and why we should be talking about it now.

We’re in a supercharged, rapidly changing landscape. From conversations we’ve been having with customers over the past quarter, there’s a feeling the investment rhythm is ramping up. Everyone wants to scale, adopt AI, or otherwise tune up their product and make it able to withstand the competition.

Getting a product suite working effectively so that users want to avail of additional features or buy extra modules in your platform creates the potential to cross-sell and upsell, which makes future growth easier. After all, when we think about where value is derived, it’s always been easier to sell to an existing customer than to acquire a new one.

But how much of that precious product development time and money will be wasted because customers aren’t availing of the opportunities you’re presenting them with – or worse, they’re leaving your platform for a competitor?

If you’re already seeing customer churn in your business today, it might be a symptom of experience debt. Other warning signs are lower renewal rates, stalling revenue, or reduced upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

Before unleashing the investment to create compelling experiences, companies need to refine their product strategy for this competitive moment in the market. Many businesses have ignored it until now because there are often bigger fish to fry in the here and now, like the next product launch or feature rollout.

Yet in the changed environment we’re heading into, they need some realignment and revisioning of the platform to focus their features and product suite around user needs while also levelling up their internal processes. To do this effectively, they need to tackle experience debt.

Yet it’s harder for internal teams to effect that deeper change outside of a ‘business as usual’ context.

It needs a revision of design systems, processes and capabilities so that continued improvement becomes possible, while avoiding the bloat that characterised the situation until now.

The key is to take a step back from the ‘business as usual’ mindset and start to plot a way forward that applies a consistent look and feel – as the user perceives it – and an internal workflow methodology that can deliver products and features reliably and consistently in a way that delivers value – as the user perceives it.

Applying UX principles will refactor products around the user’s priorities and perceptions of the product. But as you might guess, the solution I’ve described above isn’t just about applying a magic UX bandage. It’s about having a unifying future vision along with the tools and components that can deliver it.

In other words, it’s about design leadership.

And if your organisation is struggling to hire an experienced design leader who can deliver on this brief, there’s a solution for that too. I’ll talk about that in our next blog.