The Workplace Experience Product

The workplace experience should be a product strategy, but likely yours isn’t…yet.?

The value of corporate real estate and the office is no longer clear– the 5 day office work monopoly is over, but solving for hybrid and distributed work still feels like a smoosh or the Wild West.?

The last 5 years represents a seismic shift in workplace employee behavior and preferences. As a result the enterprise workplace experience is in a renaissance.?

Where, when and how we work has become a stronger competitive landscape and the employee is a savvy consumer. Workplace options have drastically diversified and many features of the workplace previously thought of as essential are now in decline.??

To continue advancing the purpose of in person work, designers of the experience must take note- we can not continue to develop places for working only as a real estate investment, we must rethink our supply and demand modeling. We must think of workplace experience design as a product- and leverage the tools and methods of product development, including product strategy, product lifecycles and product team design, product KPIs and product driven organizational design.?

When is leveraging a ‘workplace as a product’ mindset valuable for the workplace industry??

Workplace as a product is a valuable framework…

• If your job is to take a vibe and scale it. Productization isn’t just standardization; it is finding the DNA of an experience that connects the user to the brand identity and brand purpose experientially through workplace design—then knowing how to scale and measure that feeling.

• If you recognize that a workplace experience is multi-sensory and therefore a multi-disciplinary effort. People don’t see departments, they feel experiences.? In order to deliver a product people love, teams must work together in a cross-functional way, not next to each other on an org chart Experts in spatial design, AV/IT technology, food/bev and amenity programs, and front-line service staffing need to work together within an integrated product teams with a strong product manager to deliver an integrated solution.?

• If you see the value in replicating a consistent experience.? Product design’s goal is to keep the integrity of the brand, usability, and design no matter where your users are. To keep pace with growing, developing, updating and sunsetting your workplace assets, the approach can no longer be ‘start from scratch’ each time. Consistency means a clear definition and ownership of the critical components and features that make up the product offering.? An organization that leverages a product mindset (not a standards or guidelines approach) can more quickly deploy and update consistent experiences across markets and user segments as needed.?

• If you want to make a big impact. The product mindset measures and provides updates to the experience that are strategic and prioritized by the largest problem or opportunity space. A strategic narrative is a fundamental part of your productization of the workplace experience. What is the problem you are trying to solve? How big of a problem is it? What is the impact to users if you do nothing? What is the impact to users if you do something different? Applying a product mindset to the workplace experience ruthlessly evaluates pain points in quantity and cost to business. It helps build a business case for action that communicates why this is a high priority high stakes problem to solve now.

• If you are OK with letting go of the past.?A product mindset includes viewing what you have made as a ‘life cycle’ with a possible beginning, middle and end point. Products are reviewed in lifecycles, further iterations are addressed if there continues to be a provable market value. Product are sunset if there is no longer any value to the market.?

• If you are thinking beyond today- towards future customers, future offerings. Product evolution is the evaluation of the workplace experience based on evolving customer expectations. Product inception is taking a leap of faith into the future based on signals in your system or the larger marketplace. Organizations often fall short on product innovation because they only design for who their user is today. It is important to listen to both current and potential consumers and inquire on both existing and proposed offerings.??
• If your workplace product development is only listening to current consumer feedback; you are in an echo chamber of confirmatory research. You also need exploratory research, listening to the market, to other related or seemingly unrelated experiences and industries. Reporting on larger world trends and borrowing from other industries is how your product can innovate to give your consumers what they need in their next era of work.?

You likely don’t have a Workplace Product Strategy, yet.?

A product makes something that people want, and it makes money too. It is:

• Desirable- its something the consumer really needs, and is user centric in its development
• Feasible- it builds on the strengths of your current operational capabilities
• Viable-it is affordable, financially sustainable, profitable

This desirable, feasible, viable (DVF) framework helps guide what product teams should be working on, especially in product discovery and product inception. The DVF framework originated from IDEO in the early '00s and was developed to help introduce design thinking to non-designers as a method to solve problems through creativity.? As stated on https://designthinking.ideo.com/ this approach “brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows people who aren't trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges”.?

Product strategy has been applied across many industries, including industrial design and software development but also in retail, healthcare, hospitality and beyond. In the last 10 years, it has also been picked up by a new set of designers-? real estate and workplace designs teams, workplace service operators designing and operating the workplace experience in small pockets working at or learning from ‘office on demand’ consumer products like WeWork, Industrious, Convene, Gable or office product features like Hayworth, Herman Miller, Steelcase, or office components like ROOM, Poppin and Zenbooth.?

If you want to stay relevant for the next generation of workplace design, stay tuned…

I’ve been consulting on workplace service design and innovation for ~15 years and have guided workplace product inception and product market fit for the last 8. In my time working within different organizations and delivering to different users and consumers I’ve reported to different leaders and? worked within and closely with a variety of teams responsible for delivering and maintaining the workplace product experience.?

I’m often invited into a conversation when a team wants to take a different approach, to be more cross functional, user centric, with a product mindset. I’ve seen where a product mindset is integrated successfully and where it becomes too heavy, bloated or falls short. I also have met many product experts along the way, who have many useful ‘from the field’ experiences and lessons learned.? In the coming months I’ll be interviewing those folks for their insights and crafting our most useful frameworks into a sharable playbook.? Stay tuned and be on the look out for handy tips that can help you build a workplace experience product strategy that is right for your organization, your current needs and most importantly helps you build foresight muscles to lead with confidence into the next era of workplace experiences.?

The Workplace Experience Product Strategy Playbook?

• Product team structure & roles
• Product inception, lifecycles
• Strategic narratives
• Voice of consumer insights
• Pilot programs
• Location strategy
• Product guides
• Data literacy & fluency
• And more…