The Experience Edge: Power users hate magical experiences with Adam Towne

Adam Towne, Director of Product for Skilled Analytics and Funds at LSEG, started his career on an 11-hour help desk shift. Today he leads data analytics and API products for some of the world's most demanding institutional clients—asset managers, hedge funds, and banks that run the same workflows thousands of times a day and cannot afford a system going down at 3 am.

In this conversation with Jochem van der Veer, Adam reframes what great customer experience actually means when your users are experts, and why chasing "aha" moments is precisely the wrong goal.

Here's why you don't want to miss this episode

Support is a growth engine, not a cost center

Adam's career began on the help desk, and he credits that foundation with shaping his entire product philosophy. Fielding customer calls and emails exposed him to every rough edge of the product—the places where numbers didn't make sense, features were buried behind ten clicks, or documentation left users confused. That experience instilled a conviction he carries into product leadership today: support teams are not a cost center. They are a direct signal about whether your product is building trust, and the feedback they capture is one of the most underused inputs in product development. Organizations that treat support as overhead miss the growth intelligence sitting right in front of them.

Power users want monotony, not magic

Classic CX thinking is built around reducing time to value—smoothing the path to that first "aha" moment where a new user falls in love with the product. Adam argues this is nearly irrelevant for sophisticated power users. Quants at hedge funds, portfolio managers, risk teams—these users want the opposite of a magical experience. They want a boring, consistent, utterly predictable system they can run a million times without surprises. The goal is not to delight; it is to disappear. When your product becomes infrastructure that users never have to think about, you have won. Optimizing for the absence of bad experiences—not the presence of remarkable ones—is the design philosophy that earns deep trust from power users.

Good friction and bad friction are not the same thing

Not all friction is equal, and Adam draws a sharp line. For sophisticated users, friction in the setup and onboarding phase can actually be valuable—it is one of the few moments where a power user will share what matters most to them, even if they guard their proprietary strategies closely. That early friction pays dividends. Integration friction, however, is a different story. Every point where your product connects awkwardly to the broader systems a user relies on—the upstream data feed, the downstream execution platform, the firm's internal tooling—is a liability. Minimize integration friction and you show up in more workflows. Build a siloed experience and you limit your own reach.

Primitive building blocks beat endless configuration

Feature creep is the predictable outcome of listening too literally to power users. They will always ask for more granularity, more control, more options—and if you build exactly what they request, you end up with a 1995 Microsoft Word interface where no one can find anything. Adam's answer, shaped by building two role-based access control systems and watching both accumulate complexity, is to think like AWS: build primitive building blocks that are reliable and composable, then let users chain them together as needed. This approach keeps the core product simple while giving sophisticated users the control they actually need. Most users never need to see the optional layers. The ones who do can find them. That is progressive disclosure for power users.

Your product is a tiny dot in a much bigger circle

Adam invokes a mental model from John Cutler: draw a large circle representing a customer's entire workflow, then put a small dot inside it. That dot is your product. It is confronting, but clarifying. Asset managers using LSEG analytics are not in the business of using analytics—they are in the business of making investment decisions. Your product touches one moment in a chain that runs through multiple vendors, internal systems, and human conversations you will never see. Accepting this reality frees product leaders to focus on being the best possible version of that dot: reliable, precise, easy to integrate, and invisible when things are going well. The goal is for your dot to stay in the circle, not to fill it.

Product management should own the customer experience

Adam is direct on a question many organizations avoid: who ultimately owns CX? His answer is product management—not because it makes product leaders powerful, but because the alternative creates misaligned incentives. When CX is a separate department, it generates qualitative feedback that product teams struggle to act on, often without the context of technical constraints or roadmap tradeoffs. When product managers are measured against support costs, adoption rates, and customer trust—not just revenue—they are forced to see the full picture. A feature that ships without documentation, without sales enablement, without a support motion behind it is not a launch. It is a liability. Product leaders who understand that are the ones who close the gap between what gets built and what customers actually experience.

From the help desk to the big picture

This episode is essential listening for product leaders who want to move beyond feature shipping toward genuine ownership of the customer experience. Adam's perspective—earned through years on both sides of the support call—is a reminder that the signals closest to the customer are often the ones organizations are most eager to dismiss as overhead. The power user case sharpens that argument: in high-stakes, high-frequency environments, trust is not won through delight. It is won through the absence of failure, the quality of documentation, and the discipline to resist the complexity your users will always ask you to add.

For CX and product leaders navigating the tension between customer requests and product coherence, Adam's framework offers a practical and philosophically grounded path forward.

Want to hear the entire conversation? Watch or listen to the podcast with Adam and Jochem on The Experience Edge:

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