A clunky and frustrating end‐user experience is the product of a siloed or inefficient organization. To mitigate that, an entire organization has to come together and collaborate cross‐functionally by placing the user at the center of their world. An experience roadmap facilitates a clear and deliberate path that unites the entire organization. Grounded in insights, the experience roadmap play is a critical guide telling you what to focus on, when you should focus on it, and why.

Who Are the Key players in the Experience Roadmap play?

ROLE	WHO’S INVOLVED	RESPONSIBILITIES
DRIVER	Experience strategist	Define experiences, scenarios; Provide user insights.
CONTRIBUTOR	Product lead Engineering lead	Support identification of scenarios; Provide business insights; Look for product aims.

THE HOW

To build an effective experience roadmap, you need to be mindful of:

2. Defining the EXPERIENCES and SCENARIOS Your Users Have within Your System

Prioritize the users that your organization wants to understand and for whom you want to orchestrate experiences. Once you’ve prioritized them, identify all the experiences and scenarios that matter.

Experiences: An experience is an event or occurrence that leaves an impression throughout the user’s life cycle with your organization. Experiences matter to your user or business, and when designed well, a great experience can have a magnified effect on your organization’s success.

If you have trouble identifying whether something is an experience, apply the test below. If it meets all three criteria, treat it as an experience.

• Is this an important theme for your user or business?
• Does it have a substantial scope?
• Can you measure it?

Scenarios: Users move through many different individual scenarios in their overall experience of achieving (or not) their intended goal. Identify and record all of the possible scenarios in the experience you are evaluating.

Scenarios can be multi‐medium, ranging from no‐tech (e.g. friends, magazines) to higher‐tech (e.g. computers, iPads, voice). To design a holistic and consistently superior user experience, all scenarios and accompanying modality need to be accounted for and designed.

3. Extracting Business and User INSIGHTS

Extract and map key business and user insights for each of the experiences defined above.

Key business insights across the customer life cycle typically fall into the following categories:

• Adoption: conversion rates, customer acquisition cost (CAC), revenue per user (RPU);
• Satisfaction: net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction score (CSS);
• Engagement: drop‐off rates;
• Efficiency: cost/effort per experience;
• Retention: renewal rates.

Key user insights are the actions, soundbites, observations, and research gathered directly from the user. These insights can include things that your user likes, dislikes, needs, feels, wants, clicks on, or does (Chapter 28: “Experience Metrics Play”).

4. Planning for PRIORITIZATION of Experiences and Minimum Viable Experiences (MVEs)

In order to prioritize, consider your larger business goals. These could include:

• Adoption (get new users);
• Satisfaction (get more satisfied users who would recommend the product);
• Retention (keep existing users);
• Engagement (deepen engagement among current users);
• Efficiency (help users accomplish the same task faster).

Triangulate your business and user insights you extracted with your business goals and objectives. This will help you surface the most user‐ and business‐critical experiences to tackle in a defined time frame. Then, prioritize the experiences based on time frame, impact, and feasibility. The top experience(s) are the one all teams need to tackle together in a given time frame.

Identify your minimum viable experiences (MVEs) and prioritized scenarios for each experience. An MVE takes into consideration the user’s experiences across the entire journey and ensures that at least one deliberate scenario has been designed across all experiences in the users’ journey.

The levels above MVE are more enhanced experience (MEE) and most transformed experience (MTE). Review Chapter 32: “Experience Benchmarking Play,” which describes these levels in more detail.

5. Fostering COLLABORATION across Functional Silos

Bring the whole organization together when you are designing for the MVE and MTE. If you are working on perfecting your onboarding experience, involve the sales, implementation, and customer success teams to ideate, gather insights, seek feedback, and collaborate. A great user experience doesn’t stop at one particular point. Your job is to orchestrate and bring together the needed parties to deliver a transformed product experience.