4 steps to Product Excellence - how to "Do the right things"

As promised in my previous post I'll this time try to give you a specific example of the "end2end" view of the user experience. This example is taken from our work in the Telco industry but the overall concept and method should be valid for almost all industries. If you find it does not match your industry I will be very interested in hearing from you to learn how your industry works and to understand how the model could be adapted to fit your requirements.

Anyway, the model in the figure is firstly divided into the 4 main phases of the user/customer experience. These are the "4 steps to product excellence":

• Procurement (normally referred to as the Sales process, but this is actually only one part of this first phase as you can see)
• Delivery
• Daily Operations
• Fault Handling & Migrations

Starting with the first "touch point" in the top left-hand corner and moving onwards through all the phases of the "customer product life cycle" until the final migration to a new product in the lower right-hand corner.

These four top-level phases are further broken down into the 12 phases of the user experience that more closely reflects the Product - we could refer to them as the "product phases":

• Product Presentation
• Sales
• Ordering
• Delivery
• Provisioning & Installation
• Hand-over
• Surveillance & Monitoring
• Invoicing
• Changes
• Support, Customer Service & Error Handling
• Fault Handling
• Migration

The next step is breaking the product phases into very specific activities and deliverables required to implement the phase. For your inspiration we've outlined a few examples of these activities, typically implemented as processes or workflows in the organization. These activities are divided into external user facing activities, directly impacting the user experience, and internal activities required to support the external activities. An important distinction that ensures a strong linking of all activities (processes/workflows) to the user experience of the Product! This is a main objective of the "Product Excellence" method as you hopefully recall by now.

Hopefully you can begin to see the power of the model by now?

As PM's we found that this perspective on our products fundamentally changes the way we look at what a product is and what we need to have in place when developing new products or maintaining existing products. This is a structure and a method that systematically analyses and captures the user perspective of our products.

... but what about the other side of the "PM balance" (remember the "doing the right things" versus "doing things right")?

This is a subject for the next post: what exactly is a "Product"? What are the different parts of your product? This is where you as PM turn towards the rest of your organization to analyze the company capabilities you can use to design the user experience you need, as captured by the End2End Product model.

By the way, maybe you've already seen this, but the example given here is an example for standard deliveries of standard products. Non-standard deliveries will break down into a different set of underlying activities, but the 4 top-level phases and in some cases even the 12 product phases will often be the same - otherwise, please do not hesitate to comment.

Just as a small side note, you might see how this model can be used to design the main processes in your organization and provide a clear linking of all activities to the user experience, even internal activities that are not normally associated with the users. This can be a very powerful tool for designing and motivating an organization - but that's an entirely different story for a later discussion.