Customer experience - B2B (logistics)
Unpacking the power dynamics in B2B & exploring customer vs user experience
Two Steps
In B2B products operating in legacy domains like logistics, power is the highest order bit. Value is next and user experience is the lowest order bit.
Power is the leverage that the company building the product can exercise to grow. This was a learning to me as I was coming from an informal regional logistics sector in India.
Customers making the buying decision don’t often use the product. This results in sales or people engaging the customer being the product. This is what I call 2 steps away from the actual product.
The customer experience of the product does not correlate to actual outcome in the end because the user is not necessarily beneficiary of the product. And most times user is not the decision maker when making the buying the decision.
This is extremely helpful to understand and factor as product people. We invest a significant time trying to prioritise how a user experiences and not how customers experience the product .
Customers engagement is handled by sales, marketing and product pricing. Sales shape the experience. Marketing communicates the value and pricing defines the power we are leveraging in order to close the customer. Product is part of the marketing but is not assessed independently.
The dynamics of power is leveraged and how sales shapes the experience depends largely on the organisation’s strategy. If the organisation is a startup than the strategy of the product and organisation are same.
To recap what I mean by 2 steps away from defining customer experience. Step 1 is user not necessarily the customer and step 2 is power a function of organisation not product. Yet for both steps to function at a high conversion rate, conviction on product is essential.
The novice product people approach this dynamic by pitching to sales and marketing teams on how good is the product that they have built. Whereas the seasoned discuss pricing that they can offer to customers which helps marketing and sales to shape a good experience of buying.
Round up
Reading about LLMs makes one feel inadequate as a human due to the progress that is taking shape. Then, we start seeing similar patterns emerging from previous developer platform shifts. New abstractions to make the output more adaptable and reliable.
DSPy- Programming not prompting LLMs
DSPy is a declarative framework for building modular AI software. It allows you to iterate fast on structured code, rather than brittle strings, and offers algorithms that compile AI programs into effective prompts and weights for your language models, whether you're building simple classifiers, sophisticated RAG pipelines, or Agent loops.
It can be helpful because different models and user prompting are leading to varied outcomes. Drew Breunig writes about how it can be useful.
Let the model write prompts
But on the other hand: prompts are terrible. A prompt that works well with one model might fall apart with the newest hotness. As you fix these issues and stomp out new errors, your prompt grows and grows. Suddenly, your prompt may be readable, but now you need a cup of coffee and 30 minutes to diagram everything that’s going on. ..
The abstraction lets the user focus on task on the hand and not worry about optimising their prompt.
Links that resonated
Alcaraz, Sinner, Roland Garros
My teenage years were spent watching Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic battle it out for each grandslam. And now when I am picking tennis up again, we have a decade younger talent redefining what it means to win grand slams. Read Sarthak’s article even if you don’t watch the sport.
I stumbled into this endeavour by Chris couple of weeks ago and just loving the format. Like I wrote previously this year is deep down into people and folks picking up a weekly cadence deserve extra credit.
Sign off
I missed last week due to continued work which is finally coming down to a manageable level. I am close to completing my 2 years work anniversary. So a state of my year for my colleagues will start taking shape.
The idea for this week’s post came out in recent conversations which is a coherent culmination of dabbling into demand side of things for the last 6 months. I will be building on top of it.
There are many papers in my to read and make sense list.
Signing off till next time,
Vivek , learning to be serious about work