Why Experience Management Is the Next Frontier for Product Growth

1. How to Understand Experience Management

Experience management means managing experiences, which can involve users, merchants, suppliers, distributors, partners, or internal employees. All are subjective emotional perceptions influenced by many touchpoints, requiring cross‑department collaboration to analyze and improve every contact point, aggregate full‑channel data, and drive systematic value delivery and sustainable growth.

2. Why Do Experience Management

From a macro perspective, improving user experience is a consensus growth driver after cost reduction and efficiency gains, especially as traffic bonuses fade and competition intensifies. It boosts satisfaction, loyalty, brand reputation, user growth, commercial goal achievement, and fuels product and marketing innovation.

However, many Chinese companies are still in an early stage, often only conducting scattered, passive research, collecting feedback, and lacking holistic control, which leads to several challenges:

Lack of unified quantitative metrics, making experience language unclear across teams.

Traditional research cycles are long and limited in scope, hindering rapid iteration.

Disconnect between experience analysis and optimization, missing a complete tracking mechanism.

Uneven experience awareness among staff, leading to “launch‑then‑optimize” practices that risk first‑time user experience.

Addressing these issues can streamline work, improve efficiency, and enhance overall competitiveness.

3. A General Model for Experience Management

Based on domestic practice, experience management can be divided into three major categories:

Data‑centric research to diagnose current experience status and problems across the full product/service chain.

Mechanism‑centric optimization to establish standardized processes that ensure smooth experience improvement.

Tool or system development to build platforms that systematize data collection, analysis, and action.

These map to a three‑layer structure: data layer, system layer, and operation layer.

Data Layer

Build experience data, quantify experience levels, and track changes.

System Layer

Construct an experience management system that stores data and improves operational efficiency.

The system is essential because it provides a long‑term data repository, enables automated collection, analysis, and diagnosis, reduces manual effort and errors, and supports downstream operational tasks such as issue tracking, cultural building, and cross‑team collaboration.

Operation Layer

Build operational mechanisms to analyze experience data, manage issues, maintain experience users, and cultivate an experience‑focused culture.

Experience operations include four main activities: data analysis (combining subjective and objective metrics), issue management (analysis, validation, solution, and follow‑up), user maintenance (engaging typical users or communities for feedback), and culture building (spreading insights, establishing assessment mechanisms, and encouraging proactive improvement).

4. Future Outlook for Experience Management

As more companies adopt experience management, three trends are expected:

Refinement : Capture, analyze, and optimize experience across the entire user lifecycle and all touchpoints with greater granularity.

Diversification : Expand to various industries and scenarios, requiring richer data sources, multi‑dimensional metrics, and customized tools.

Intelligence : Leverage emerging technologies for automated data collection, AI‑driven diagnostics, and smarter optimization workflows, making experience management more efficient and effective.