The Transformation of the Product Journey

Introduction

Mitra:
‍Hello and welcome to today's episode of Syntra. If you haven't listened before: this is the podcast for you who drive your function forward and want to understand how the interplay between systems and users shapes the way we work. We share insights into how new technical possibilities are transforming the way we work and interact with technology.

In today's episode we'll be talking about the transformation of the product journey. With me today, I have Glenn once again.

Glenn:
‍Hi!

Mitra:
‍Welcome back. It feels like we've said that a few times now. Great to have you with us again. We also have a new face with us, Magnus Eklund.

Magnus:
‍Yes, great to be here! First time. We'll see if there's more to come.

Mitra:
‍Exactly. We'll see after today's episode. Who are you, Magnus?

Magnus:
‍I'm a PIM developer here at Fiwe. I've been here for almost seven years. I've worked a great deal with PIM, and even before I joined Fiwe I worked with PIM. So it's been a lot of product information, you could say.

Mitra:
‍You've been part of, and witnessed, this transformation we're going to talk about.

Magnus:
‍You could say that.

What do we mean by a product journey?

Mitra:
‍Great. Let's get started with today's question, and we might as well begin with: what do we mean by a product journey?

Magnus:
‍In our context, we usually mean from the point where we receive data from the supplier until it's ready on the web so the end customer can see it. That's our delimitation of the product journey. That's the PIM's role in it all.

Glenn:
‍The companies we work with want to reach a market. Usually it's an e-commerce store, but not only that. Often it's physical stores too. I think that's the final destination where we consider the product journey to end. But the product is born somewhere. The whole concept is born, it comes into being. Usually from some kind of supplier file, but not exclusively. Many companies are manufacturers, so they generate their own data and create a product out of nothing. But along this journey there are lots of interesting silos. I think it's precisely the silos the product travels through that are the interesting challenge to manage.

Magnus:
‍Yes, because each part of the silo chain sees its own version of the data and what they think is important in it. So that has a big impact. But the important thing is that it ends up good and available to the end customer, regardless of medium.

Glenn:
‍That's always the goal. But the more layers of communication you have in between, the harder it is to make transformations along this journey. You always lose information as soon as you have to communicate between different people or different parts of an organization.

Mitra:
‍This makes me think of boarding a plane at Landvetter to fly all the way to Auckland, New Zealand. One group comes along to the stopover in Helsinki and gets off. Then a new group boards and travels to Kuala Lumpur, and then they get off. And then there are a few who travel from Landvetter all the way to Auckland. It sounds a bit like the product journey. Where does the product journey begin and where does it end, concretely for us?

Magnus:
‍For us, it's when we receive the data from either the supplier or the manufacturer. You could take it even further and say the product's journey really begins on the drawing board. But for us, in our world, it starts when we get the data from the supplier or manufacturer.

Mitra:
‍If we go back to your example of it starting on the drawing board – where does it end?

Magnus:
‍Where does it end? When it's no longer sold and has been discontinued from the assortment. Except it continues even then, because you need traceability backwards. Warranties, and we need to be able to see where the product comes from. As long as someone is using the product, it will still exist.

Glenn:
‍Exactly. The journey is something that exists over time, but what the journey actually is changes. It's like a continuous journey from identifying a product and realizing it needs to reach its market, to it reaching its market, and then eventually the journey continues as it goes into a decommission state.

Mitra:
‍That's a challenge. Going back to my airplane example: it's hard for those who came along to Helsinki airport to know what things were like in Auckland, unless they stay on for the whole flight.

Glenn:
‍Then they haven't been on the full product journey and reached its goal. Because the goal of the product journey is to become a sellable item. But if you get off in – was it Copenhagen you said?

Mitra:
‍Helsinki.

Glenn:
‍Helsinki. If you don't reach Auckland, it doesn't become sellable.

The history: from mail-order catalog to e-commerce

Mitra:
‍That's very true. If we look back at the history of the product journey, what has it looked like? Take 1995, for example.

Magnus:
‍1995? That was a long time ago. I'd argue it comes from the mail-order companies with their catalogs, who caught wind of this internet thing. You could actually put your information there. At first it was probably just an article number, a name, and a price. There probably wasn't much more in the beginning. It was fantastic for the people placing orders – or so they thought.

Glenn:
‍Did they? Was it really a step forward? It must have been.

Magnus:
‍Well, you no longer had to fill in an order slip and mail it somewhere. You could go straight to a page and just say: "This is what I want."

Glenn:
‍This was really the first time companies started having multiple channels for getting the same information out. First you had a catalog – you printed it and sent it to all your customers – and then you add another medium that's supposed to show the same data.

Magnus:
‍Is this where the need for PIM arose?

Glenn:
‍It's starting to become a channel.

Magnus:
‍If you only have one channel, you can manage with your Excel sheet.

Glenn:
‍Exactly, but as soon as you have several channels, you want some kind of consistency in how you present your product data. It's good if the product has the same name in the e-commerce store as in the catalog. Probably good with the same price too.

Mitra:
‍It makes the decision easier. What you described there, Magnus – they had nothing else to compare with. Those were probably great methods and ways of working. They simply didn't know what we know today.

Glenn:
‍Since it came from a printed catalog, there was a publishing mindset. You create a version and send it out. It was quite static. We make this catalog, this edition, and then it goes live. But the web isn't built that way. It's something that lives all the time and can be continuously updated.

Magnus:
‍Although back then the web was quite static. You published the page and it was static in a different way. Then it has evolved with the technology.

Mitra:
‍But has it evolved? If we look back to '95 – how much has the web evolved? E-commerce specifically.

Magnus:
‍Searchability, there's much more real-time information. You can get stock levels. You have customer-specific prices. You log in to the site. So quite a lot has happened.

Glenn:
‍Also the type of information that's available. All kinds of environmental data and things that are required today didn't exist back then. It was, as you said, what was in the catalog. Maybe a picture and a name, a short text. That was the information being communicated.

Magnus:
‍And that was the information that was needed back then. There weren't the same legal requirements on traceability. Or how much carbon dioxide has this product contributed to emitting?

Mitra:
‍And surely users' needs have changed too. What requirements did people have, what actually influenced whether you bought something? How much information did you need to order a product? It must have looked completely different.

Magnus:
‍Yes, probably. And there's also more competition today. You have to fight harder to make your site and your products visible, I think. Back then it was the mail-order companies. Each company had its own products in a different way. So it's probably more aggressive getting your message out today.

Glenn:
‍It's probably always been the case that whoever has the most information available wins the purchase. But in the beginning, all it took was having those five or six fields available on an e-commerce site, and you had the most information. Then you were there. But then someone else comes along with more, and it becomes an information war over who can best get the message about their item out to customers. That's who actually wins the customer. The result is a much more complex world today, with far more information being communicated.

Mitra:
‍But is the biggest step going from a physical product catalog to a digital one? Is that the biggest step, e-commerce-wise?

Magnus:
‍That's when e-commerce began, I'd say. Before that, there was nothing. So yes, that became the biggest step. But then many steps followed. Small steps happen all the time.

Mitra:
‍They do. What small steps have we seen?

Magnus:
‍What we mentioned earlier – stock levels, where available. Maybe even per store. Being able to log in, having your personal page with customer-specific prices.

Mitra:
‍That sounds like a lot of changed user expectations.

Magnus:
‍I'd say so. It's driven by attracting and retaining users.

Mitra:
‍Do you think it also matters that if I've had a great experience on one e-commerce site, I raise the bar somehow, and suddenly my expectation sits there? Even if I know that this particular company is exceptionally good at this. Somehow it's been normalized for me, and I want everyone else to work the same way.

Magnus:
‍I definitely think that's the case.

Glenn:
‍Absolutely. That's what makes us raise the bar all the time. That's what you expect. The best you've seen is what you expect from the next one.

Why does PIM exist – and what has the concept become?

Mitra:
‍But why do we have a PIM? Why does PIM exist?

Magnus:
‍I usually think of PIM as the hub of all product data. It's what collects product data from different channels. That can be industry databases, or directly from suppliers and manufacturers. And then it publishes to all the channels that need the data. It's important that they get the data they want. It's the PIM's job to merge the data, refine it, and quality-assure it.

Mitra:
‍That's the role of PIM?

Magnus:
‍Yes, I think so.

Glenn:
‍Being able to consolidate product information and distribute it consistently is really the PIM's mission, so to speak. I often get stuck on the terminology PIM, product information management. I think it's a concept that often has many things baked into it. People often say "we have a PIM team" – they're the ones working with master data on products. But data management and master data are concepts that don't necessarily have to be synonymous with something called PIM. Storing information and declaring "this is the golden record for my product" is not the same thing as maintaining and updating product information. I think we make things hard for ourselves when we package all of this as one concept. So many things have become PIM today.

Magnus:
‍Yes, it's easy to put everything under PIM. It's an established term in a way, but consolidating products from different sources is a completely different task from making the product good and sellable on the web.

Glenn:
‍One is an enrichment step that's part of this product journey. The other is like a collection step on the product journey. But we often push them into the same terminology and call it PIM.

Mitra:
‍If you could break that terminology apart, how would you divide it? What would you call the different parts?

Glenn:
‍You start somewhere in a collecting phase, which is data collection. Then you have an enrichment phase, where you dress the products with your internal information – your prices and your taxonomy trees, things you can't get from external sources. Then you have a validation layer, where you check that the product is sufficiently enriched and follows all your standards. Then you have a distribution layer, where you send this information out to all consumers – which could be the mail-order catalog and the e-commerce store. If you talk about those four as separate things, instead of PIM, the conversation gets easier.

Mitra:
‍So it's really about different phases rather than which systems. Because PIM is essentially a system.

Glenn:
‍PIM is often a system, but it doesn't have to be. It's the management of product information. It can be one system, which it often is. But it can also be several systems. Often it's one central system with several subsystems around it that solve the PIM task.

Magnus:
‍Yes, because I think people have historically assumed that those who work in PIM do everything. Then you want everything under one interface. But I think it's increasingly the case that the different parts are done by different people who may have different requirements. They have different requirements because they're doing different things.

The product journey today

Mitra:
‍That brings us to the next question: what does the product journey look like today?

Glenn:
‍We've touched on it a bit, but it depends on which company you look at. Everyone has their own individual product journey. If you create your own products, that's one inflow. If you buy from suppliers, that's a completely different flow. Many are hybrids too – creating their own products and reselling. Everyone probably has individual journeys.

Magnus:
‍Yes, they almost have to. Few companies are like any other. They work in different ways. They have different views on which data matters to their customers.

Glenn:
‍But there are still a lot of common denominators on this journey. You receive data, and then it needs to go out somewhere once it's enriched. That has to be common regardless of company.

Magnus:
‍Yes, exactly. The different parts of the journey are probably very similar. But how you approach them can differ quite a lot. And it does differ quite a lot, we know that.

Glenn:
‍We talked at the beginning about how static it used to be, how you sent out your data. You send out one version of the catalog. I don't think that really exists anymore. Not at all to that extent – you enrich continuously.

Magnus:
‍And publish continuously. As soon as there's new data, it gets published, in a different way.

Mitra:
‍It started with a catalog of products, then a digital catalog of products. Since then, users' needs and expectations have grown. New types of information have become possible – legally required, in some cases, but surely also expected by users: I want to know this and this. That has expanded the amount of information being shown. You also talk about how the PIM had a specific role, but more and more things keep falling on the PIM. Could it be that organizations simply haven't organized themselves? There are no functions to take care of these new requirements, phases, and types of data that keep arriving – instead you've kept one function, the changes have just kept growing, and organizationally you've pushed it all into that one function. That's why it ended up there. Because you mentioned, Glenn, these different phases, as you might call them. In my head I immediately think: imagine if companies could have departments or functions according to these phases. Then I'm no longer thinking PIM. I'm thinking it's the team working on that phase, and the team working on that phase. Then I'm not really thinking systems either, beyond: how do I access it?

Glenn:
‍I think you're onto something here. Not so much in terms of where we are today, but where we're heading. I think we're moving in that direction. It's hard to get an efficient organization if all these subfunctions depend on expert knowledge of one specific system to make all these updates – updates that really should be spread across the organization much more broadly than today. Maybe it shouldn't just be the 20 people in the PIM team making the updates; it should be made available to category managers, or the people who actually know these products for real. Maybe they're the ones who should be doing the task. I think we've gotten a bit stuck in being one function and one system, and then the user-friendliness isn't there to distribute these kinds of capabilities across the whole organization.

Magnus:
‍More like: the ones who have the information are the ones who should update the information. Not hand it to someone else who then goes into the PIM.

Glenn:
‍Exactly.

Magnus:
‍That's how it works now.

Glenn:
‍A bit like I said at the very beginning: as soon as you introduce communication somewhere, you get a delay and you lose information. If you have to ask someone else to do a task, you introduce a communication step that maybe isn't needed. If you could do it yourself directly, it would be faster and more accurate.

What's next: personalization and product experience

Mitra:
‍That leads us to – now that we're talking about it – what's the next step?

Magnus:
‍Looking at the PIM and the web, I think customers want even more customer-specific data. They want to see data that's relevant to them. We keep adding more and more attributes and data to the items. As a customer, maybe I'm only interested in five percent of it. It's a lot of information – good information – but imagine if there were a way for me to get only the information I want, and skip the rest. I don't quite know how to solve that.

Glenn:
‍You're really talking about product experience management. Partly, it could be wanting customized texts for each user group. Take a builders' merchant: a person like me, doing a bit of carpentry on the weekend, has completely different data needs compared to someone architecting a skyscraper. We have totally different data needs, but we're met by the same data dump. So the data could be described differently. But removing things is at least as important. Only show what's relevant.

Magnus:
‍Exactly.

Glenn:
‍As a private customer, I don't need to see all those building certification classes and things I don't understand.

Magnus:
‍Maybe you're only interested in eco-labeling, if you care about that.

Mitra:
‍Those are two different things to me. Seeing what's relevant can simply mean removing the rest. I'm hunting for computers – remove the TV screens and lamps, and I'll look at computers. That's not really a change in the information itself. But as you both touched on, this desire to see things in a more personalized, customized way – where does it come from? Why does everything need to be so incredibly customized? From me no longer just seeing the relevant computer I'm hunting for – now that computer also has to appear in the context of my living room. Why do we need such a high degree of personalization of the data?

Magnus:
‍That's a hard question. I don't know. I think users want to recognize themselves. It's about attracting customers. If the customer can recognize this item in the context they want to use it in, that can influence the purchase.

Glenn:
‍Partly that, but I also think all the chatbots out there are pushing this idea that you can always get an answer based on your context. You can always get everything customized. So far it basically only happens in chatbots. We're starting to see similar things in Google search results, where a summary of your search results pops up. What I'm saying is that I think these are shaping behavior and shaping expectations. That's what drives what customers want, and it will change how we deliver product information.

Mitra:
‍A bit like we said earlier. You raise the bar and then the expectation is set. You've tried a chatbot, you've seen what it can do, and then you expect everything else to deliver the same way.

Glenn:
‍Exactly.

What does it take to succeed with your product data?

Mitra:
‍Time flies here. We have one last question to get to. Now I want to hear: what does it take to succeed with your product data?

Magnus:
‍It's a bit like what we've been saying. It's not an IT project, it's a business project. The whole organization has to be involved. The different parts have to be involved. It's not just a PIM group that should work on this. Everyone has to understand the implications of bad information. It's dangerous.

Mitra:
‍And perhaps also the entire product journey we talked about, not just one leg of it. Not just the flight between Landvetter and Helsinki, but from Landvetter to Auckland.

Glenn:
‍PIM has often gotten stuck as a grouping, but it has also gotten stuck in the pigeonhole of being a support function that just solves everyone else's tasks. I think we need to promote the value of product information and talk about it in terms of a product journey that involves the whole organization, and elevate it so it actually gets the focus it needs across the organization. It's the information that allows customers to make the decision to actually buy the products. That's what drives sales. So you shouldn't see this as a support function – this should be a central journey in every company. If the product information doesn't reach the customers, the customers won't buy any products, and then you have no business.

Magnus:
‍Exactly.

Mitra:
‍You also can't act on what you don't know. I strongly believe in informing within companies and starting to talk about the entire product journey. Not just talking within the different functions and silos, as you mentioned earlier, but talking about the entire product journey at the top of the company, and letting it filter down, so that the leaders within each function also talk about the whole product journey. Then of course we have to talk about the pieces we own and the pieces we know. But every now and then, we lift our gaze toward the product journey. Because this data is constantly being sent, going out, and picked up somewhere else.

Magnus:
‍Exactly. Maybe we should talk about the product journey instead of talking about PIM. Because I think PIM can be off-putting for people who aren't in PIM. That's "those people who work with that". Even though people outside PIM contribute the data, they don't feel like they're part of PIM.

Glenn:
‍Because then it's ended up in a pigeonhole, instead of "you're part of our thing, which is this journey".

Mitra:
‍We can of course develop functions, systems, and solutions to support the different phases or needs. But it sounds like one of the most important aspects you're pointing to is the communicative one. How we talk shapes how we see things, and how we act accordingly. It becomes outside-in instead of inside-out.

Magnus:
‍Yes, but it still holds: garbage in, garbage out. That never changes.

Mitra:
‍If you were to send one tip to everyone listening – they want their product data to succeed and the whole product journey to work well, making sure the products reach the market. Where should they start?

Magnus:
‍Maybe adopt the concept of the product journey. It takes some of the drama out of it.

Glenn:
‍And start establishing, if they don't already exist, clear communication forums for the entire product journey. So you can talk across the silos and not just in separate forums in each section. Lift your gaze a little. Look at the whole journey as a whole and see how we can improve it.

Mitra:
‍Those are things we can actually do. You can start today.

Glenn:
‍It's one phone call away.

Mitra:
‍Or a tap on a colleague's shoulder. Here's the product journey – what does it tell you?

Summary

Mitra:
‍A big thank you, Magnus and Glenn, for today's fascinating conversation about the product journey and its transformation. Great to have you here.

Glenn:
‍Thank you very much.

Magnus:
‍Thank you very much.

Mitra:
‍And a big thank you to everyone who listened. I hope you enjoyed the episode, and don't forget to send in feedback or thoughts if you have requests for other topics. I hope we'll talk again soon.

You've been listening to Syntra, a podcast from Fiwe.