The Experience Edge: Why product teams keep missing the real journey

Steve Cleff, product design leader and founder of Prismatic Vision, joins Jochem van der Veer to explore why product teams so often build without anchoring to the real customer journey—and what it takes to change that. With over 15 years of experience leading product and design at companies like Comcast, Barclays, and Siemens, and agency work spanning JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Target, and Vanguard, Steve has spent his career at the intersection of customer experience and product thinking. Now building Prismatic Vision, he's also deep into multi-agent AI workflows—and has plenty to say about which parts of this work remain irreducibly human.

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

Product teams are floating without an anchor

Steve is direct about a pattern he's seen repeatedly across large organizations: product managers end up in a feature farm, churning out features disconnected from any real customer need. The root cause isn't laziness or bad intent—it's that the customer experience has been lost as the organizing principle. In Steve's view, customer experience doesn't begin at the product interface. It begins the moment someone has a problem. From that first symptom to the moment they become an advocate, the full journey is the fuel that should be powering what the product is and how it grows.

The language barrier between product and CX

One of the most persistent obstacles to collaboration is that product and CX teams speak entirely different languages. CX argues for features based on client feedback and industry best practices. Product pushes back on scalability, roadmap fit, and long-term health. Both are right—and neither is being heard. Steve's solution: stop leading with CX thinking and start speaking the language of business outcomes. If you can tie customer experience work to an adoption problem an executive is losing sleep over, you stop asking for permission and start getting invited back. "If you want someone to listen to you, you have to speak their language."

Who really owns the journey—and what does ownership even mean?

Steve pushes back on the question of ownership altogether. Creation and maintenance of the journey clearly belongs to the CX team—they have the skills, the empathy, and the ability to build trust in the data. But championing the journey inside a product organization? That's where product needs to show up. The most impactful journeys aren't created for their own sake. Steve adapts them for different audiences—engineers, business stakeholders, designers—surfacing the friction points most relevant to whoever's in the room. There's a canonical version he trusts internally. What gets shared is shaped by who needs to act on it.

The journey happens whether you design it or not

A quote from a previous guest stuck with Steve: "The journey happens whether you design it or not." Customers don't wait for product teams to get organized. They have their own paths, their own workarounds, their own moments of friction and delight—and the product is just one stop along the way. The organizations that get this right are the ones where customer experience becomes everyone's responsibility, not just a department's mandate. Having a CX function doesn't exempt the rest of the business from owning the outcome.

AI is changing the speed, not the why

Steve spent time as a genuine AI skeptic—watching organizations try to replace researchers with tools that had no understanding of context, no ability to read emotion, no way to make the unconventional human connections that lead to real insight. Then he started building, and his view shifted. The "why" of customer experience work remains irreducibly human: understanding people, sensing what matters, making the leap from data to meaning. But synthesis, distribution, structuring journeys, turning hundreds of hours of call recordings into usable patterns—all of that can and should be accelerated. His caution is equally clear: generating journeys from a generic LLM without real business context isn't a shortcut. It's a way to make confident decisions on a foundation of nothing.

The roles are changing—and that might be a good thing

In a few years, Steve suspects job titles will matter less than the specific value people bring. Not "product manager" or "CX researcher," but adoption specialists, insight translators, engagement strategists. As agents take over the task-oriented work—writing user stories, structuring analysis, reformatting decks for the next level up the chain of command—what remains is the part that was always most valuable: strategy, creativity, and genuine empathy for customers. People who don't want to stay up until 10pm writing user stories shouldn't have to. That time and energy belong elsewhere.

Where the Journey Actually Begins

This episode is a practical call to action for anyone navigating the tension between product velocity and customer understanding. Steve's perspective is shaped by years of having to sell the value of UX and CX from the inside—always adapting his message, always connecting customer insight to the business problem that actually needs solving. His honest take on AI, on the frustrating reality of organizational silos, and on what makes journeys genuinely useful rather than artifacts gathering dust on someone's laptop makes this essential listening for product and CX leaders alike.

For teams wondering why their journey work isn't landing—or why product and CX keep talking past each other—Steve's answer is straightforward: find the shared goal, speak the language of the people you need to convince, and make it easy for them to act on what you know. The journey is already happening. The question is whether your organization is paying attention.

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

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