Welcome!
Hi, I'm Ben, and I'd like to welcome you to Product Experience Insights, or PEI for short. *
As with all good products, this site is a work in progress. The goal is to share ideas I've picked up during my tech career, to help you create products with a great experience for your users.
My background and qualifications
I've worked in tech roles for 20+ years. I learned to program because I enjoy making something from nothing. Many new programmers choose to learn multiple languages; I chose to expand my knowledge by trying other aspects of software development, such as testing, documentation, and process improvement.
Although I've always enjoyed coding, I got into product management because I wanted to sidestep "how do we build this", and look at why we choose to do one thing over another. I wanted to have a say in product development, and learn more about the business side of things. This has meant a lot of conversations with customers, clients, and stakeholders: to understand the root of what they want to do, and make sure I'm solving real problems for people.
My background means I'm a technical product manager. But I'm still a user at heart. I use many apps and websites daily, and I've had a wide range of experiences with different products. I try to work for companies where I can use their products, as this helps empathise with customers: because you're a user too.
Meanwhile, I've had several false starts with blogs and newsletters, largely because my areas of interest are quite wide. So it's hard to focus on one thing. A good thing about product management is you get involved in many different areas. However, it doesn't really help with my focus.
What is Product Experience?
Product Experience is something that focuses on the user journey throughout a product - so the overall experience, rather than the usability of a single screen. From Pendo:
Product experience (PX) is the customer’s journey within a product. PX is similar to user experience, however, product experience refers to the customer’s overall experience with the product, from beginning to end. In the software industry, product experience (PX) refers to the portion of the customer journey that takes place within the application.
Source: Product Experience (PX), Pendo
Why Product Experience?
Though it's still broad, Product Experience includes a few elements I find particularly interesting:
- Looking at every change holistically: seeing how it fits into the wider product, instead of developing things as islands, ignoring the surrounding elements.
- Looking beyond a single journey, and at the sequence of journeys a user goes through in the product's lifecycle.
- Keeping a strong focus on great usability, but also consistency across different functionality, both in terms of how it feels to use, and how it looks.
Sign up today!
If this sounds interesting, please sign up for future updates. Doing so means I can see you value this type of content, which will make me publish more posts.
In the meantime, if there are any specific topic you'd like me to cover, please get in touch. Thanks for reading and I hope you read future posts!
Ben
* (I decided to steer clear of Product Experience Essentials, as that acronym wasn't particularly attractive.)