People remember experiences. They don’t remember attributes or benefits or features.

The quote is from A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter and Gamble, in the January 28, 2005 Business Week.

It’s something I struggle with often as a product manager. Like most product managers, I’m technical, so I love all the new features and gewgaws. But as I look back at my previous releases and at customer response to them (and my own response, since I use my own product on a daily basis), I find it hard to remember which features were new and which were always there. My experience today with the product is what matters – it’s a great result when the improvement of experience aligns with the new features. I’m happy to say that the new version of my product is working out that way. But I’ve certainly shipped features in the past that excited me as a technologist, and that were expensive and fancy and worked well, but that didn’t improve the customer experience. On the other hand, was that energy wasted? In some cases yes, but luckily there are other metrics for success in addition to experience, such as addressing a particular customer’s needs, or moving to a better technology, or enabling a new capability (such as an API) that won’t affect customer’s experience except indirectly.

There are a lot of good resources up there, including a number of active blogs, weekly live presentations (that are archived), forums, and many articles, such as these:

• Enhancing User Experience By Employing Collective Intelligence
• Project Management and Business Analysis: Dependencies for Success

Tom himself has a great blog – latest article is on Twitter, which I ended up installing as a result (I’m nilsie).