What happens when you let your product lead R&D?

- a quote we love, and the perfect opener for this week’s topic.

We recently stumbled across a gem from 2023 by none other than McKinsey:
Experience-Led Growth: A new way to create value

It might be two years old, but the insight hits harder than ever:

➡️ Companies that focus on improving experiences for existing customers grow more than 2x faster than their peers.
➡️ Losing one customer often means acquiring three new ones just to break even.
➡️ Most telling: top-performing companies design their commercial strategies around delivering distinctive experiences for customers, using insights to anticipate needs and innovate.

Why this matters for DPPs

We covered this: if your product could talk, what would it say? Now we are asking: what would it learn?

A Digital Product Passport (DPP) can be a two-way channel. A feedback loop. A real-time insight engine.

DPPs let your product capture what customers do, ask, need and struggle with. They turn dumb objects into smart conversations.

In other words, DPPs unlock:

• Real-time feedback that scales
• Location-agnostic usage data
• Feedback loops built into every customer interaction

And the brands that use those conversations to innovate? They’re pulling ahead.

Real-world case: Oliva Cigars

Oliva Cigars used Twintag’s QR-enabled Digital Product Passports for its cigar boxes. What happened next was telling:

• 20,000 scans in one year
• That’s ~9% of all shipped boxes
• Averaging 60 scans per day, from around the world
• 200+ users submitted direct written feedback via the DPP

That wasn’t just curiosity. It was participation. They gave customers a voice. A voice that said where their cigars were enjoyed, what they found interesting and what they thought could be better.

Three reasons this matters more than ever

1. Product innovation = survival
   In saturated markets, the best product wins & and customer-led product development is the fastest way there.
2. Efficiency gains
   DPPs surface patterns. What’s breaking? What’s unclear? What’s returned? This helps R&D, support and ops work smarter.
3. Data-backed business cases
   Want to pitch a new SKU, service, or feature? DPP usage data makes the case airtight: no guessing, no gut feel.

Look at your most successful product. Now ask:

• Do we know how customers actually use it?
• Do we track where they get stuck?
• Have we updated it based on real-world feedback?

If the answer’s “No”… there’s your opportunity.

Final thought

You’ve spent years making your products exceptional.

Now let them return the favor, by telling you exactly how to make the next ones even better.