Should You Be Treating Your Business Like a Product?
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Performance Improvement

Should You Be Treating Your Business Like a Product?

January 25, 2025

6 min read

Devin Culham

Devin Culham

This may be something you’ve experienced before.

You go to a nice restaurant hoping to have a great dining experience. Instead, the server forgets your drinks, you ask for a steak medium rare and receive it well-done, and when it’s time to ask for the check, your server has conveniently disappeared. As a customer, all of these moments influence your experience. Maybe you’re forgiving and will give the restaurant a chance to redeem itself, or you will complain and leave a one-star Yelp review.

In this example, we highlight the criticality of user experience (UX) in generating positive business outcomes. At each of these touch points (forgotten drinks, overcooked steak, and misplaced server), there’s an opportunity to review where a breakdown in service occurred and where there are opportunities for optimization. The solution may be as simple as hiring better personnel. Or it could be something more profound, like bulky order placement software or unorganized kitchen operations.

For businesses, repeated poor experiences can impact the bottom line. A restaurant with poor service will struggle to get repeat customers, just like an ill-defined product will struggle to reach users, and a website with an outdated checkout platform will lose out on sales opportunities. In this article, we will discuss the importance of design thinking, a method utilized in user experience, and how businesses can leverage it to address more than just their customer-facing activities.

What is Design Thinking, and Why Should Businesses Become Aware of It?

For many, user experience can be a pretty opaque term. The foundation of user experience is design thinking, which is a “human-centered approach to innovation that draws from designers’ toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

Three Lenses of Design Thinking.
Design thinking attempts to uncover solutions that align with users expectations, technology feasibility, and financial viability.

Design thinking is used to tackle ill-defined or unknown problems to unearth creative solutions. Design thinking should have a goal that addresses people’s desires, has a feasible solution, and is financially viable (Interaction Design Institute n.d.) These three ‘lenses’ of design thinking are critical to ensure that the success of one approach doesn’t overwhelm the needs of the other. Ideally, a potent solution that utilizes design thinking is successfully executed in all three areas.

In business, this practice most commonly manifests through design iterations to digital interfaces like software, mobile applications, and websites. Indeed, many companies employ teams of UX professionals who hypothesize possible solutions, conduct research, design prototypes, and perform user tests to develop seamless task flows that make taking action, such as booking a hotel or checking in for a flight, as intuitive and unobstructed as possible. These activities can significantly impact business performance, such as increased number of users or subscriptions, less churn, and even a positive impact on revenue.

If user experience can influence business outcomes, why do businesses seem to allocate resources only to market-facing activities like software, mobile applications, and websites?

What about if we have a terrible experience as an employee? Perhaps it’s a specific task, like submitting an expense report using a pesky process. Or, it’s something far more complex, like siloed operations. As employees, we often have to deal with these problems. As employers, we may be unaware of growing dissatisfaction until attrition rates rise.

So what’s the antidote? How can companies leverage the benefits of design thinking to improve internal operations and employee experiences? And why should they?

Making the Case for Employee Experience

Perhaps employee experience is already on its way. At least, that’s what the authors of a recent Harvard Business Review article suggest. According to authors Erich Anichich and Dart Lindsley, employers should consider not only the choices that their customers have but also their employees (Anichich and Lindsley 2024).

“We believe that companies can benefit from a radical reframing of work as something that employees actively choose to ‘buy’ with their labor—and that must be designed to help them make that choice every day,” write Anichch and Lindsley.

In one example put forth by Anichch and Lindsley, project management software Asana utilizes a practice known as management design. Management design is a program that sees management becoming a “distributed responsibility.” Project leads ensure that teams do the most important work toward an objective, while managers focus on crafting desirable work experiences for their employees.

In another example, Anichcich and Lindsley cite the Canadian e-commerce company Shopify, which recognized that employees have differing needs for compensation, whether to maximize their saving potential or receive high-risk, high-reward benefits like equity compensation. In 2022, Shopify introduced Flex Comp, a program that lets employees choose a combination of salary and stock-based, citing, “Why should a company decide for you how much your reward should be in the form of cash vs. equity?”

For some companies, investigating employee experiences may be something as simple as reallocating or scaling existing resources. For companies that already have UX resources in-house, making the transition to an employee-centric experience may only require scaling up existing resources or adapting team structures to meet new demands.

centralized ux team
Companies with existing UX resources may consider scaling or reallocating UX teams to address employee experience.

Although there are several ways to organize UX teams, including centralized, decentralized, and matrix team structures, centralized UX teams may offer the best path forward for employee experience (Gastadello 2023).

Centralized UX teams, like the one pictured above, are often known as the ‘internal agency’ model. This model can complement existing UX resources by allocating them to design and redefine company processes specifically. In practice, these internal UX teams would exist separately from product or service-oriented UX teams. Instead, internal UX teams might operate nomadically across departments on a project basis or dedicate themselves full-time to a specific department.

Measuring the Cost of Not Considering Employee Experience

One hot topic that has recently made headlines has been directives from companies like Amazon, Dell, and JPMorgan pushing a full-time return to office (RTO) strategy (Rubin 2025). Often motivated by commercial real estate leases and draconian management styles, the new directives have upset the post-pandemic equilibrium, which has seen an influx of permanently remote or hybrid positions. But that doesn’t mean workers don’t have leverage.

In 2022, more than 50 million employees in the United States ‘walked away’ from their jobs, 35% without another job to replace it (Anichich and Lindsley 2024). Jessica Zwaan, chief operating officer at Talentful, suggests that companies should “think about work not only as a product but as a subscription product.” Employees, like customers, can choose to remain employed or ‘cancel their subscription’ at any time.

Some companies, like Trip.com, are taking note. As one of the world’s largest travel companies, which employs 40,000 employees worldwide, it decided to explore this issue further by leveraging design thinking models to test hypotheses and measure results (Bloom, Liang, and Han 2024). The company wanted to test whether a full-time RTO policy or a hybrid, 3-day in-office model would lead to greater performance, productivity, and employee satisfaction.

Trip.com used A/B testing to evaluate office-based vs. hybrid models with 1,600 China-based marketing, finance, accounting, and engineering employees. The control group worked in-office five days a week for six months, while the hybrid group attended three days. After six months, the company reviewed the results of their tests. Not only did participants in the hybrid model achieve a 1% increase in productivity and higher satisfaction rates, but Trip.com also saw a 33% decrease in employee churn among hybrid participants, resulting in millions saved in attrition costs.

Treat Your Company (And Employees) With the Same Consideration as Your Product

Businesses should consider their bottom line, especially performance improvements that can increase sales and improve customer outcomes. However, ‘keeping a clean house’ is often overlooked. Companies may be missing out on essential wins that can be resolved by applying the same consideration to their business operations as their products and services. Allocating resources toward design thinking and user experience resources, whether in the form of new departments, nomadic, project-based teams, or external agencies, can unveil areas of improvement that directly contribute to higher job satisfaction and retention rates. By adopting design thinking principles internally, organizations can create a more engaging and fulfilling work environment where employees feel valued and empowered.

This shift enhances operational efficiency and fosters a culture of innovation, as team members are encouraged to share their insights and feedback openly. Ultimately, companies prioritizing employee experience alongside customer experience will likely see improved performance across the board. By recognizing that their employees are just as important as their customers, businesses can cultivate a more motivated workforce and establish a competitive advantage in today’s dynamic market.

 

Sources:

Anichich, Eric and Dart Lindsley. 2024. “Reimagining Work as a Product.” Harvard Business Review. Vol. 102 Issue 6 (2024): 61-65.

Bloom, Nicholas, Liang, James, and Ruobing Han. 2024. “One Company A/B Tested Hybrid Work. Here’s What They Found.” Harvard Business Review. October 29, 2024. Accessed November 6, 2024. https://hbr.org/2024/10/one-company-a-b-tested-hybrid-work-heres-what-they-found?ab=HP-latest-text-5

Gastadello, Giada. 2023. “How to structure and manage a UX team: Setting team members up for success.” Maze. August 11, 2023. Accessed November 6, 2024. https://maze.co/collections/ux-ui-design/ux-team-structure/

Interaction Design Foundation. N.d. “Design Thinking “DT”. Interaction Design Foundation. Accessed November 6, 2024. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/design-thinking

Rubin, April. 2025. “These major companies want workers back in the office”. Axios.com. January 1, 2025.  Accessed January 25, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/01/01/back-to-work-office-companies 

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