A Departmental Collaboration Guide, your essential resource for understanding and optimising your partnerships across your organisation.

Cross-Function CX Engagement > Product Development/Engineering

Product Development/Engineering

The Product Development and Engineering department is responsible for designing, building, testing, and maintaining the company's products and services. Their mission is to create high-quality, innovative, and reliable solutions that meet customer needs and drive business growth.

Key Goals & Priorities

Deliver the product roadmap on schedule and within budget.
Improve product stability, performance, and security.
Reduce the number of bugs and critical incidents.
Enhance the user experience (UX) and overall usability of the product.
Innovate and develop new features to maintain a competitive edge.

What Product Development/Engineering Needs from Customer Experience (CX)

Customer Insights & Feedback: Synthesised, actionable feedback on product usage, usability pain points, and feature adoption. They need to understand not just what customers are saying, but why, with clear data on the impact of issues.
Journey Mapping Contributions: Visualisation of the customer journey where product interactions cause friction or delight, helping to inform the prioritisation of bug fixes and enhancements.
Advocacy for Customer Needs: CX can act as the "voice of the customer" in planning and prioritisation meetings, sharing qualitative and quantitative data to champion customer-centric features and highlight unmet needs.
Process Improvement Suggestions: Collaboration on improving the feedback loop, from bug reporting by a customer to resolution by an engineer, ensuring efficiency and clear communication.
Data & Analytics: Data on top contact drivers related to product issues, churn reasons linked to product gaps or bugs, and CSAT/NPS scores tied directly to recent feature releases or product updates.

How CX Can Engage & Collaborate Effectively

Regular Communication Channels: Establish a dedicated Slack/Teams channel for real-time feedback sharing and a bi-weekly "Voice of the Customer" sync to discuss trends and deep-dive into specific issues.
Joint Initiatives & Projects: Participate actively in user acceptance testing (UAT) and beta programmes for new features. Collaborate on creating user stories and personas to ensure development is truly user-centred.
Data Sharing & Reporting: Provide the Product team with a regularly updated dashboard showing the top product-related customer pain points. Share curated, impactful customer verbatim feedback to bring the data to life.
Cross-Functional Training/Workshops: Offer "Day in the Life of a Customer" workshops for engineers and designers. In return, attend Product roadmap overviews to better understand upcoming changes and technical constraints.
Attending Their Meetings: Request to sit in on key rituals like sprint planning, backlog grooming, and roadmap review sessions to provide immediate customer context and answer questions.
Active Listening & Empathy: Understand the pressures of development cycles, technical debt, and resource constraints. Frame feedback as a collaborative effort to solve problems, not just a list of demands.

Key CX Touchpoints & Intersections

User Onboarding Experience
New Feature Launch & Adoption
Bug Reporting & Resolution Process
In-Product Feedback Mechanisms
User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

Success Metrics (Shared or CX Impacted)

Feature Adoption Rate
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) / Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Churn Rate (specifically product-related churn)
User Task Success Rate

Questions to Consider for Collaboration

"How can we best translate raw customer feedback into actionable user stories that resonate with the engineering team?"
"Which part of the upcoming product roadmap could benefit most from direct customer insight or user testing?"
"What are the biggest technical trade-offs the Product team is currently facing, and how can customer data help them make more confident decisions?"

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