316 - Experience Design is Product Management

July 17, 2023·23 min·1 clip

Tricia Houston asks 'What other business are you in?' — Chick-fil-A says they're in the leadership business; Zappos says they're in customer service.

1. This is Product Management episode 316 features a conversation between host Roddy Knowles and Tricia Houston, COO and founder of the Experience Build Group, on the practice of experience design. 2. Tricia Houston leads EBG, a six-person experience design practice inside MMR Research Associates, staffed by designers, researchers, marketers, consultants, and IT professionals to provide 360-degree perspective on customer and employee experience. 3. The episode's core thesis is that experience is not a department but a company-wide mindset, and that closing the right gaps — rather than all gaps — is the real goal. 4. Houston argues that even small-scope projects, like redesigning a single set of in-store signs or a single app feature, can have cascading effects that reveal systemic experience problems. 5. She identifies the digital-to-physical seam as a persistent challenge, illustrating with a case where a customer ordered via app, received a wrong order at a drive-through, and was told their remedy was a handwritten coupon on a sticky note at the counter. 6. Houston also describes a positive digital-physical integration: a grocery app that displays the exact aisle location of an online-ordered item during an in-store visit — noting that even good solutions go unused if customers don't know they exist. 7. She recommends starting customer experience work by reading the verbatim open-ends from VOC surveys rather than just coded quantitative scores, arguing that a single customer response can point to a systemic problem worth investigating. 8. Houston differentiates two research modes: 'understanding mode,' which has low rigor requirements and can be done by anyone, versus 'prediction mode,' which requires statistical rigor before projecting opinions at scale. 9. Experience gaps, she explains, split into two categories: unintentional gaps that harm customers and must be fixed, and intentional gaps that reflect deliberate business strategy and only require clear communication. 10. She uses Aldi as a textbook intentional-gap example — the quarter-for-a-cart, no-free-bags, and single-checkout policies are all trade-offs that Aldi communicates explicitly to justify its lower prices. 11. The 'other business you're in' framework asks companies to name a second identity beyond their product: Chick-fil-A describes itself as being in the leadership business, Zappos in customer service (rewarding the longest customer call), and Southwest in the love business. 12. Houston argues that linking abstract values to concrete employee activities is what actually aligns organizations, and that values statements alone are insufficient without behavioral anchors. 13. She describes employee experience work as primarily preparation — writing the 'script' or 'service standards' that give frontline workers a framework for human touch points, especially in distributed or remote teams. 14. Houston notes that human touch points differentiate companies most at the moments when something goes wrong, not during normal transactional flows. 15. She advises companies to survey customers on a polar scale asking whether doing business with the company 'is a chore' or 'something they look forward to,' as a simple diagnostic. 16. Houston recommends that product managers shop outside their own industry deliberately, using her own experience working at Home Depot and noticing that questionnaires omitted online-research and online-purchase paths 12 years ago. 17. The conversation is conversational and collaborative, with Knowles sharing his own product-manager perspective alongside Houston's consulting lens, resulting in practical back-and-forth rather than one-directional instruction. 18. The energy is calm and collegial, with both speakers building on each other's points without interruption or debate. 19. This episode will resonate with product managers, customer experience leads, and operations professionals who want practical frameworks for diagnosing and closing experience gaps. 20. Listeners who are looking for deep UX research methodology or technical product development content will find this too high-level.

As heard by us

A grounded product conversation about using customer signals to find experience gaps before they harden into business problems.

Experience design is framed here as an operating discipline, not a layer of polish. Roddy Knowles' conversation with Tricia Houston, founder and COO of the Experience Build Group, keeps coming back to a practical idea: companies often already have clues about where customers or…

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If you want a clearer way to use customer signals to decide what to look at next, start here.

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