What is the Complete Product Experience (CPE)?

What is a product?

A product is any item or service that a business sells. Right? Not necessarily. In fact, a product is so much more. It is the entire experience that customers have with your company. This starts the moment someone realizes they need a solution to their problem and includes the tools your teams use to support that customer.

There are many blogs and books covering the customer experience. Aha! co-founder and CEO Brian de Haaff first wrote about the concept of the Complete Product Experience (CPE) in his 2017 book, Lovability. The CPE encompasses every interaction people have with a product, from discovering it and making a purchase to becoming loyal advocates. Brian also writes that in particular, product managers need to focus on building a Minimum Lovable Product (instead of a minimum viable product) to realize a CPE.

Building lovable products requires you to consider all the touchpoints people encounter as they use your offering and engage with your team. Every interaction — whether positive or negative — contributes to how people feel about your company and product. To ensure a CPE, then, you have to think holistically. You must cultivate a relationship with customers based on respect, trust, and lasting value.

In this guide, we will look beyond the hardware or software we often think of when we say "product." This means examining exactly what it is that customers buy and the role product managers play in delivering the CPE. Keep on reading, or use the following links to jump ahead to a specific section:

Why should you think holistically about your product?
What are the components of the CPE?
What is the role of a product manager in the CPE?

Why should you think holistically about your product?

Thinking holistically about the entire experience you offer is essential to business success. People can tell whether or not a company truly cares about helping them. This is true at any stage of the customer journey. For example, consider a sales team that glosses over prospects' questions or uses high-pressure sales tactics. When people feel coerced into purchasing a product, they might naturally assume that the company is only interested in making a quick sale. Those customers who have unhelpful interactions with the support team or unpleasant experiences with your company's policies? They will probably remain one-time buyers. Or worse — they will look for a competitor that offers a similar product with better service.

This is why it is so important to put customers at the center of all you do. The most successful companies constantly strive to optimize each component of the customer experience. Viewing every touchpoint as an opportunity to improve people's lives shows that you care. It demonstrates that you understand their struggles, empathize with their pain points, and want to invest in building a long-term relationship. Over time, this inspires customer loyalty (and even lovability).

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What are the components of the CPE?

Besides thinking about the actual goods or services you provide, you need to consider the other interactions that contribute to people's experience with your product. We can bucket these into high-level phases of the customer journey:

Pre-purchase interactions: When customers visit your website, read reviews and testimonials, and peruse your social media channels
Purchase interactions: E-commerce or in-store shopping experiences involving checkout, payment, interactions with staff, and trials that (hopefully) make customers want to buy
Post-purchase interactions: Order status communication, quality of customer support assistance, and interactions with the technology you use to deliver your product
Ongoing engagements: How your customers feel about loyalty programs, forum or user group activity, and your internal team's responsiveness to requests and ideas
Long-term relationship building: What customers think about the account or product support you provide, any upsell or cross-sell experiences, and how personalized their interactions with your company are

Let's take a deeper look at the key touchpoints you have with each customer.

In the world of software and technology, the CPE has seven main components, presented here in a rough order that shows the typical product adoption process. However, the reality is that customers tend to adopt products unpredictably, according to their own tastes and priorities. An organization must be flexible enough to handle multiple adoption paths while staying focused on delivering a high-quality, lovable CPE.
Brian de Haaff
Aha! co-founder and CEO

Take a look at the graphic below and the content that follows, which explore the CPE's core parts:

A graphic showing the components within the Complete Product Experience

Marketing	How do potential customers discover your product? How do they learn more about it? Company blog posts, newsletters, and ads are examples of marketing efforts that enable you to reach and engage with an audience.
Sales	How do prospects get more information to determine whether they will make a purchase? They might speak to a member of your sales team, join a demo, or sign up for a trial. The quality of each of these interactions contributes to whether or not they decide to make a purchase.
Technology	What are the core product features? How does your company deliver these features? Customers expect the technology and platforms they pay for to be more than functional — they want a frictionless experience without interruptions and glitches.
Supporting systems	What internal systems does the team use to deliver the product? When you adopt better billing, accounting, and analytics systems, the logistics of selling and supporting your product becomes simpler. It is easier to deliver the actual product and keep track of sales and other user data.
Third-party integrations	What other products and services do people use in conjunction with your product? For software products, integrations and extensions are important considerations. They help customers seamlessly incorporate your product into their existing workflows.
Support	How do you offer help and customer training? How do you gather customer feedback and prioritize enhancements? Continually supporting customers and improving your product requires you to understand what users need, identify new opportunities to help them, create a self-serve product knowledge base where they can source information, and build the features that will deliver the most value.
Policies	What are the company's values? What product development framework does the team follow? Having clear guidelines in place for interacting with teammates and customers creates a uniform code of conduct. For example, everyone at Aha! follows The Responsive Method: a set of principles that drive how our company serves customers and each other.

The seven areas of the CPE contribute to the full customer lifecycle, from awareness through to advocacy. But having plans in place for each area is not enough — you also have to make sure that each touchpoint functions smoothly with all the others. For example, the values and messages that prospects hear during engagement need to be consistent with what folks tell them during onboarding and billing. When each stage of the customer lifecycle clearly supports the next, customers can be confident in your ability to provide a positive product experience.

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What is the role of a product manager in the CPE?

Product managers are responsible for envisioning and delivering the CPE. But you cannot do it alone. Delivering a CPE takes input and collaboration with marketing, sales, support, and engineering teams. By working together, you can ensure customers find delight in every interaction with your organization.

Consider the launch process. Besides defining a cross-functional product launch plan, you also have to determine how the new feature might impact other internal groups. Part of your role as a product manager is to collaborate with other teams — so you need to provide guidance or identify areas where customers might need more (or different) support than before.

For example:

Tell your marketing team about how new features will improve customers' lives. This will help marketing teammates promote it in a way that is authentic and captures customers' attention.
Ensure the sales team understands how the feature solves a customer problem or answers a certain need. When you do, customer conversations can be specific and credible.
Provide customer success and support teams with enough time and materials to dig into the new functionality. This empowers them to better answer customer questions.

A new product or feature launch is just one example of a PM's role in the CPE. You also have to think about how to achieve it at the macro level. The exact actions and focus areas will depend on your company, product, and customers. And because product development is complex, you will also need a framework to help you manage the strategizing, brainstorming, planning, building, releasing, and success-measuring that is imperative to delivering the CPE. Our team uses The Aha! Framework for product development. We recently shared what that looks like and how you can adopt (or adapt!) this methodology, too.

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If you use Aha! Roadmaps, you can use our Frameworks functionality to view The Aha! Framework, define your own best practices, and link to where the work should be completed. Or if you just want to explore this methodology on a whiteboard, try The Aha! Framework template.

Start using this template now

Thinking more broadly about what you offer is a valuable skill for every product manager. When you constantly strive to increase customer joy at each touchpoint, it is easier to identify novel ways to help your users. After all, building products is all about service — you are creating a solution that helps people.