Is product management dead?  No… but it does need to evolve. 

According to Lucinda Newcomb in her recent article “Product Management is Dead… Long Live Experience Management” the goal of a product organization is not just to build features and functionality, but it is to deliver an end to end customer experience.  

But in order to do so, the organization needs to evolve.  

It needs to move from being a feature factory, to a strategic product delivery, to an experience management organization.

To help us walk through these stages of organization evolution, I sat down with Lucinda for a brief conversation.  

Lucinda Newcomb was most recently the Chief Product Officer for Weight Watchers (WW), and has led large product organizations at some of the most well-known consumer companies in the world, including Walmart, Sephora, Lonely Planet, BBC Worldwide, The Gap and Yahoo!.  

What follows below is a condensed and lightly edited version of our interview.

Lucinda it is great to have you as a guest.  And I absolutely love the article you recently published.  It is right on spot.

Now before we jump into your three maturity levels.  Let’s start with the basics.  What is a product?  How is it changing within traditional organizations? 

Lucinda Newcomb:  Mustafa thank you for having me.  You and I talk almost every week.  Now we get to share it with everyone.  I am looking forward to it.  

And by the way, this is such a great question.  In every organization that I have experienced, there has never been a succinct definition.  And for good reason, it’s not easy.

But before I answer that question, I do think we should start with a definition.  I like the one I created with my team at Sephora:  “Product Management is at the intersection of business and technology, defining, designing and delivering digital experiences that delight customers and drive business impact.”

The reason we needed to create our own definition is because Product is different everywhere. Product Management originated in technology companies – the product you are building is the product you are selling.  It generates direct revenue.  And you as the product leader are the “CEO of the product,” where you own the whole thing, from pricing, what you are building, the GTM, everything.  

But in traditional companies, that link does not exist. It’s harder when what you are selling is a physical product or a service.  But I feel like in the last two decades, as traditional companies have developed their digital direct to consumer channels, there has been this realization that it is no longer just about the physical product.  It is now about an entire customer experience.  And if you do it right, it can be a massive amplifier. 

Agree….it’s not just about the physical product anymore.  It’s about the holistic customer experience.  And for some companies, it is definitely a big paradigm shift.

I am curious, how are organization’s adjusting to this new reality?  How are they trying to build the best experiences for their customers?     

LN:  To be honest…it’s all over the place.  

In my observation, most companies sit within one of the three stages of product evolution.  This is what my article is about.  

Phase one is the feature factory, where the company just gets really good at churning out one feature after another.  On-time delivery is the name of the game. This is a good starting stage, because a lot is getting done.  

Phase two is strategic delivery.  Where you are able to prioritize and focus on delivering features that are most likely to drive customer and business impact.  Instead of just delivering a bunch of “stuff,” not knowing what is working, the team spends time on discovery and experimentation, with a clear north star of what success looks like.

Phase three is end to end experience management.  Where the customer is at the center and all the company’s functions come together to design the best possible solution. The experience is understood to be not just the features, but all elements of the experience – content, coaching, community, messaging. 

Great.  If you don’t mind, lets dive into each phase shall we.  Tell me more about phase one.  Why is it so awesome?

LN:  Right..this is the phase when you realize that customer experience is important.  

So then you cherry pick your best project managers, give them scrum teams, invest in agile.  And just let them go.

The goal here is to simply churn out one feature after another.  

And frankly it feels good.  Because stuff is getting done.  You start getting speed, you start seeing traction, and everyone’s like, yeah, yeah, and the teams are autonomous, and they feel great.  Your definition of success is simply we delivered stuff.  Which is such a novel concept for many organizations.  

Well if it is so good.  Why even move to phase two.  Why not just sit here?

LN:  Because eventually you get to the bottom of the checklist.  And you start to realize that you don’t know which of the things you’ve checked off are actually helping your customers.

In fact, it is worse than that.  As you get good at being a feature factory, you start to deliver more and more features. But if you are just building stuff and throwing it over the wall, eventually you will reach the tipping point of overwhelming your customer.

Second, you don’t know when something actually hurts your experience versus helps it.  If success is to launch something, then by definition anything you launch is good, and that just can’t be right.  No one has a 100% hit rate, but when you equate launch to success, you are essentially assuming that is the case.

Third, you are so head down with being efficient, you don’t have the time to go look for the next big thing to do.  Think about it, you have 1 PM responsible for 10 -15 engineers.  That PM is enslaved by your agile due dates. How the heck are they supposed to come up with something new and innovative? When do they have time to talk to customers?

Fourth, as you scale this approach, and add more and more teams, eventually they start to veer into other teams’ lanes. I call this drunk driving. Because the teams are so focused on efficiency, they don’t take the time to collaborate across teams to think about how everything will fit together for the customer. Teams start to argue over what they own. 

And so this is when you start to think there has to be a better way.  

Before we go there.  If you’re an executive who has put in a feature factory, and everyone is applauding all the things getting done, what are the signs that they would see that things are kind of breaking down? That it is time to evolve?

LN:  Well when we built it at Weight Watchers, there were two really big red flags that told us that it was time to evolve.

First, the customers started to tell us that the experience was getting overwhelming. That was our biggest indicator.  

Second, when I would ask the teams, why are you doing this feature? Or how do you know that was successful?  They would give me answers like well we launched it on time.  Or, worse, I was told to build this feature and I don’t know why but we did it. 

Third, the teams were fighting with each other, asking who owns the decisions. When your prioritization can’t be reconciled across teams, then you know you’ve got a problem.

But ultimately, the issue was there really was no accountability on impact.  We couldn’t draw a straight line between what we built and our member and business success. That is what necessitated evolving to phase two. 

Great so let’s talk about phase two, which I believe is strategic delivery.  Can you please share a brief description?  

LN:  So phase three has three new ingredients. 

Number one is you need to have clear impact metrics to prioritize against.  In phase one you are always trying to do low hanging fruit.  The easy stuff.  But if you know what your impact metrics are, all of a sudden, you can prioritize really effectively.  

For example, at Weight Watchers we first aligned with the entire business on our north star metric of LTV:CAC. Using Lifetime Value and Cost of Acquisition as a ratio was critical – it told us we want to acquire new customers while prioritizing long-term success and retention, it wasn’t an either/or conversation. 

We then broke the ratio down to component metrics like engagement, frequency of visits, NPS, retention. And we broke it down even further – things like DAU/MAU – to give us earlier insights into what would ultimately lead to success for our northstar metrics. And then each team was focused on a specific metric or set of metrics they were trying to impact, knowing that they would ladder up.

The second ingredient and this is all too often missed is to create dedicated time to do discovery.  Because if your product managers are enslaved to those due dates, they do not have time to go find out what the customer needs.  

And this comes down to having a few healthy guidelines.  Like having a dedicated designer participate in the customer discovery.  Or knowing when to do discovery and when to do delivery by asking ourselves two questions: how certain are you this is a good idea? What’s the risk if you’re wrong?

And the last ingredient is skills.  Most project managers don’t know what it means to do true customer discovery – part of turning them into product managers is teaching them discovery techniques.  

I’ve done this several places – and the times I’ve really missed the boat was when I under-estimated just how much time and investment it would take for the up-skilling. 

Because you can give the team these targets, these impact metrics, the time and techniques… but if they don’t have the right skills and coaching, they will basically go wander in the desert until someone tells them what to do.

But if you are now creating time for discovery, this means less delivery.  How were you able to square that within the organization?

LN:  That is the real danger of this phase.  And one of the reasons why companies are not so eager to move here.  After all, why give up your efficient factory and start delivering less.  

Getting people on board was not easy.  There were a few lessons I learned at Weight Watchers.  First, I should have communicated more.  I thought I had done a pretty good job setting expectations.  But it was not enough.  You just have to do more of it consistently.

Second, you have to start small.  At Sephora, we started off with a very small handful of teams.  This allowed the rest of the feature factory to continue working until the new way proved out.  We were not disrupting the addiction to delivery.  You have to insulate and protect the teams trying the new way because there is a tendency for the organizational inertia to take over and pull back to old habits.  Keeping it small until it has proved out prevents this from happening. 

Third, I mentioned this earlier.  The skill gap is huge and it needs to be addressed head on. And it’s not just like training around the edges.  This requires a straight up change in the way you do everything training.  And this stuff is hard.  It wasn’t enough to add new leaders to my team who had done this before. 

We all had to train together to create and solidify common language and practices. It’s not enough to adopt generic best practices or rely on experiences from elsewhere – you actually need to create your version of what will work at your company, and drive commonality.

Completely agree with your last comment.  Most leaders don’t realize how big of a skill gap exists.  And it’s not just standard training that is required, but the coaching, the hand holding, and all the follow through.  That is so much needed.

LN:  Yup.  Bringing your team up to speed requires a full blown plan all in itself.

Oh one more thing..before I forget.  Don’t try to rush.  We had early success with our pilot teams.  But then we added more teams too quickly, partly because every other team wanted in and did not want to miss out.  

What we should have done is to keep the transformation tent a little smaller.  Wait until we had real data to show how it’s working and why it’s working, and then consider bringing other teams in. 

We should have moved with more intention, but we got swept up in the desire to be “done” with the transformation. The fact is you are never done evolving and improving.

Before we go to phase three, when did you recognize that this was not it either.  That you needed to move on?  How did you recognize it?

LN:  Phase two is much better at building customer experience.  But even in this phase you are limited, because you are still looking at the journey from your lens.  All you are doing is making the current digital features better.

But if you are asking the more fundamental question – what are the customer’s goals?  What are they trying to achieve?  Then you realize features aren’t enough.

You have to put yourself in the customer’s shoes.  

For example, at Walmart, we were great at creating and optimizing features. Search? Check. Checkout? Check. Is it available in the store?  How much does it cost? etc.   

These are all features.  But that misses the larger journey.  

For the customer, the features are just one element of the journey.  They’re not shopping for yogurt and pizza, they’re trying to feed their families. When you start to define the success of their journey, not just the feature, it requires you to look at all elements of the experience. Content. Marketing. Operations. Delivery. Everything.  All the touch points that you can think of.  

And that is what we are trying to get at when we move to phase three.  Where we are now delivering end to end experience management.  Where we put the customer in the center. 

Got it.  It makes sense.  It’s not just about the features any more, it is holistic.  And it cuts across all the various organizational functions.  Is that right?

LH:  Yes…exactly.  

In the previous phase, each element of the business is doing their own thing to help deliver a superior experience.  This includes product, marketing, sales, contact center etc.

But from the customer point of view, that is still disjointed.  

For example, say you wanted to solve a specific user problem.  In phase two each silo would do their own thing.  Product would build features.  But what if features weren’t the best way to solve that problem.  What if it is content, or FAQ, or community or something else.

Phase three requires organizations to put the customer in the center and design a holistic experience around them.

So Lucinda, we are talking about a monumental shift by going to this model.  It literally blurs the lines between all the functions.  And this is not easy.  So may I ask, why do this?  What is the benefit?

LN: This is definitely not easy.  

In my opinion there are three main benefits.  

First, you’re going to get a way better customer experience. It’s going to be more seamless. It’s going to be more logical. Your customers are going to look at it and feel good.  Like the company put them in the center while solving their needs.  

Second, your teams are going to be so much more effective.  It’s no longer about roles.  It is about solving the customer’s problem.  The cross-functional teams are going to be independent, autonomous, and make quick decisions.  The organizing principle is not the functional silos but around customer problems.  

Third, it’s more cost effective.  Instead of having multiple functions, trying to solve the same problem in different ways, you’re going to be looking for what’s the most cost effective way to solve this problem across functions.  You get rid of the redundancy and duplication of effort.  You get rid of overspending on a feature when what you really need is better content.  

And the best part is that all three of the benefits create a virtuous cycle, where they reinforce the fact that this is what it really means to be customer centric.  

Agree…the virtuous cycle is what makes this worthwhile.  Before we end our chat, any recommendations / advice you would like to give product leaders as they move through this phase?

LN: Yeah, a few come to mind.  

First is patience, patience, patience.  This is not a quick journey.  Can easily take 4 – 5 years of dedicated hard work and effort. And as I said earlier, it’s not about trying to rush to an arbitrary endpoint.

Second, this is a team effort.  You have to lift the entire organization with you – inside and outside of Product.  That means gaining alignment,  forging alliances. You need to give a little to get a little.  

Last, is that you can’t do it alone.  Ideally find a buddy or a trusted advisor, that is outside of your organization.  To be your sounding board, help you look around corners, be in your corner.  You are going to need it.   

This has been such a great interview.  We can probably talk about this for hours at the end.  But I think our audience might just sit up and leave.  So one last question, I know you publish quite a bit.  May I ask where our readers can find you?

LN:  We can do this all day and all night.  

In fact we have.

LH:  That’s right.  We have.  

Anyways, it’s great to be on your show.  Thank you for inviting me.  

As for my writing, it has been such a gift to be able to take a minute and reflect on what I’ve seen, learned and done. I particularly like to talk about “the how.” I believe how you do things is as important if not more so than “the what” you get done.  

You can find my writing on Linkedin and Medium.  And for this particular topic, you can find my article here.

Thanks for having me.