Telecommunications | Product Design | B2B | Product Strategy
Human-Centred Product Strategy
Client
NBN Co
Timeline
6 months
Role
CX Lead
Overview & Challenge​
NBN Co, responsible for rolling out Australia's National Broadband Network, needed to establish product strategy foundations focused on customer-centric design principles. As the physical network was being constructed across Australia, the company needed to ensure its product offerings were designed with end-users in mind, even though their direct customers were Internet Service Providers rather than consumers.
Key Challenges​​
​
- Balancing the needs of two customer layers: service providers (direct customers) and end-users
- Creating customer-centric approaches in an organisation with a strongly technical culture
- Establishing design frameworks in a company still building its product management capabilities
- Navigating complex stakeholder environments with varying priorities
- Developing evaluation frameworks that could guide future decision-making
- Understanding diverse customer experiences across different regions and demographics
- Creating alignment between product strategy and the company's national mission
My Approach & Contribution
I led a comprehensive consulting engagement to establish customer experience foundations and develop strategic frameworks that would guide product development. My approach focused on building both capabilities and deliverables that would enable customer-centred product decisions.
What I did
1. Conducted research with service providers to understand their needs and challenges
3. Developed service blueprints mapping the complete customer journey from awareness to ongoing use
5. Established a customer-centric evaluation framework for product decisions
7. Created detailed journey maps for distribution throughout the organisation
2. Created end-user personas based on extensive fieldwork in NBN's first release sites
4. Facilitated workshops with sales, operations, communications, quality, and product engineering teams
6. Built consensus around experience principles that could guide product development
For the end-user research, I started with an online survey about the installation process. From this survey, I recruited 14 residential and home business users to participate in contextual inquiries across three states. A second survey, two months after the first, gathered insights on users' perceptions of the fibre product's performance after they had been using it for some time.
Results & Impact
01
- Created a customer experience foundation that continues to guide product development
03
- Established experience principles that shaped the organisation's approach to design
05
- Created a framework for evaluating future product decisions through a customer lens
02
- Developed influential personas and journey maps used across the organisation
04
- Provided evidence-based insights that informed equipment design improvements
06
- Built a shared understanding of customer needs across diverse internal teams
Key Learnings
Technical teams need to see customers, not just specs. In organizations with strong engineering cultures, tools like personas and journey maps make customer needs real and relevant—helping technical teams think beyond network performance.​​
Visual tools bridge gaps between diverse stakeholders. Our journey maps created a common language that got everyone talking about what customers actually experience, not just what each department believes happens.
Consider the complete ecosystem, not just direct relationships. Even though NBN only dealt directly with service providers, understanding how decisions affected end-users led to better equipment design and installation processes that improved the entire experience.
The insights from our end-user personas confirmed opportunities for improvement in the design of equipment installed in people's homes. Based on this evidence, NBN Co began exploring options to redesign the equipment, addressing aesthetics, functionality, and usability for consumers in future rollout areas.
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Synthesis
Early Findings
“The personas show us how we need to work with different people; while the journey maps help my team to see the bigger picture and not get caught up in day-to-day issues. They are both very powerful tools that are adding immense value to the way we operate,”
Katrina Harrison, Customer Focused Design Manager- Products, NBN Co
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Final Personas
Journey Maps