What Is a Product Experience Manager?
by Lumavate | Last Updated: Nov 2, 2023
Think high-quality products are enough to satisfy your customers, build your brand, and grow your business? Think again. In the era of the informed, expectant, and omnichannel consumer, you need to deliver more than a high-quality product. You also need to deliver an exceptional product experience.
Product experience encompasses the holistic impression and interaction a customer has with a product. It includes factors like usability, aesthetics, quality, support, and how well it meets expectations. A positive product experience fosters customer satisfaction, increases brand loyalty, and influences brand perception.
A Product Experience Manager is responsible for ensuring that a company's products provide exceptional user experiences. They oversee various aspects, including market research, user feedback analysis, and product development. They collaborate with cross-functional teams to define product strategies, features, and improvements, ensuring alignment with user needs and company goals. The Product Experience Manager plays a pivotal role in optimizing the user journey, enhancing product usability, and ensuring that the product delivers on its promises, ultimately driving customer satisfaction and loyalty while contributing to business success.
What Is a Product Experience?
Product experience refers to the customer's complete experience with a product.
In addition to comprising direct physical interactions with the product, it includes all digital experiences related to the product across the entire product journey—starting with initial awareness through long-term usage of the product.
Wondering about the difference between product experience and customer experience? While these terms are similar in terms of their holistic nature, they aren’t the same thing. Product experience and customer experience are related but distinct concepts.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the difference between product experience and customer experience:
Product experience focuses specifically on the interactions and perceptions related to a product or service. It encompasses the quality, functionality, design, and usability of the product.
Customer experience is broader and includes all interactions a customer has with a brand, including pre-purchase, post-purchase, and support interactions. It extends beyond the product to encompass interactions with sales, marketing, customer service, and other touch points, aiming to create a seamless, positive, and lasting relationship between the customer and the brand.
What Is the Role of Product Experience?
The purpose of product experience is to ensure that customers have positive experiences across all of their interactions with a brand’s products. This begins in the consideration and evaluation stages and continues through the purchase, onboarding, long-term usage, and repurchase and expansion stages.
Given the complex and many-factored makeup of product experience, it follows that planning is essential. Specifically, brands need product experience strategies that outline all the potential interactions a customer will have with a product through each step of the customer journey with that product.
These interactions should outline many things, including:
What is the ultimate goal of each customer interaction with the product?
How will the customer interact with the product at each stage?
What should the customer feel as they interact with the product?
What content should the customer receive during each product interaction?
A well-planned and executed product experience strategy will drive results across the following metrics:
User acquisition
Onboarding
Product adoption
Conversion
Retention
Overall revenue
Speaking of metrics, the impact of product analytics cannot be overstated. A recent Harvard Business Review report indicates that product analytics are the topmost determinant of digital experiences and business success in our digital-first world.
What Is a Product Experience Team?
While the importance of product experience is undeniable, companies approach product experience responsibility differently. While some companies have dedicated standalone product experience teams, others task a collection of people in various roles with responsibility for the overall product experience.
The product experience team meaning is accountable for developing and implementing a strategy that ensures customers have positive experiences with each product interaction.
Focus areas include key performance indicators, such as:
Customer acquisition
Product adoption
Customer satisfaction scores
Ongoing product usage
Product feedback
Product repurchase
Expansion sales to other brand products
Retention
No matter how the product experience team is structured, cross-functional work is crucial to creating, implementing, and executing exceptional product experiences.
As such, a Product Experience Management (PXM) platform supporting communication and collaboration plays a pivotal role in facilitating optimal outcomes.
What Is a Product Experience Manager?
Product experience managers are responsible for the overall product experience for one or more products. The typical product experience manager is an expert on both the product functionality and customer expectations.
The product experience manager’s primary responsibility is to ensure customers have an exceptional user experience each time they interact with the product. They oversee the end-to-end product journey, collaborating with cross-functional teams to define product strategies, features, and improvements. They conduct market research, analyze user feedback, and align product development with user needs. This role focuses on optimizing the product's usability, aesthetics, quality, and overall satisfaction, aiming to deliver an outstanding product experience that not only meets but exceeds customer expectations, fostering loyalty and contributing to business success.
Some companies may dedicate a full-time individual to this role while others may include product experience management as a component of the product manager’s job.
In both scenarios, product experience managers are accountable for product experience outcomes—even though actual product experience strategies and implementation are cross-functional.
How to Optimize the Product Experience Management Process
That brings us back to PXM platforms like Lumavate. This powerful tool provides manufacturing company marketers with the sophisticated functionality they need to centralize their product data.
Combining a Product Information Management (PIM) for managing their digital assets with built-in Digital Asset Management (DAM) functionality, Lumavate also empowers marketers in this space to create branded digital product experiences—including everything from websites and product catalogs to campaigns and events—with its Digital Experience Platform (DXP).
Product experience managers have a lot on their plates. PXM platforms make it easy to unify product data, streamline the product experience management process, and consistently deliver enhanced digital product experiences.
To see for yourself how Lumavate can transform your product experience management toward elevated product experiences, schedule a demo today.