6 Steps: How to Define an Experience Strategy:

These six steps were created to get you or your company started on the “how” to begin creating your Experience Strategy. If you want to understand more about the “why” it’s important to define an Experience Strategy take a couple of minutes to read “With No Experience Strategy you could be missing 70% of your market.”

Step One: Align to Company priorities

How well is the business aligned with how customers experience your brand?

Stop one is aligning to, or creating, a “Shared Vision” as a representation of the destination that everyone in the company can picture in their mind and be inspired to move towards and align to the priorities that the company has in place to get there.

Step Two: Align to customer needs and values

How well do you know your customers/users and what they value?

Determine the needs, wants, and behaviors of the prioritized customer segments and develop an overarching approach, concept, or big idea that serves as a theme or guide for all design work.

Example Methods, Tools & Artifacts:

• Customer Modal by Segmentation

• Customer Experience Map

• Customer Personas

• Interaction models, purchase models

• Customer Video Highlights

• Customer journey maps, mental models 

• Ecosystem experience strategy 

• Feature set recommendations, concepts, designs 

• Feature roadmap, release plan

• Interaction design, wireframes, templates

• Metrics scorecard for benchmarking 

Understanding your customers/users begins with the right questions and then the “tool kit” of the Designer therefore depending on the research question(s) that need to be answered, you can then choose the proper tool or method for the job.  Always remember, it’s not about the tools but how the “tool” helps us get the answers that move the company towards its goals. 

Step 3: Differentiate against competitors

What set of activities delivers value to your customers/users that is sustainable and different?

Understanding the competitive landscape of your immediate competitors is crucial, but more importantly, the non-obvious threats.

Differentiate the company’s product and service from its main competitors and provide a road map that shows how the future releases progressively achieve goals that will get you to your Shared Vision in a measurable way.

Steps to Differentiate from Competitors 

1. Create a competitive set of things relevant to your business and customer experience. 

2. Create a set of tasks corresponding to areas of your Experience Map that have the highest value.

3. Assess and rate the experience offered by competitors from the perspective of your most valuable customer archetypes/personas.

4. Identity experience design components that meet your customer’s needs in new ways and evaluate them for inclusion in your roadmap.

5. Identify design approaches that are superior to yours.

6. Communicate the results broadly, with deliverables. 

7. Update the table with a frequency that makes sense in your industry.

“New entrants, unencumbered by long-term history in the industry, can often more easily perceive the potential for a new way of competing.  Unlike incumbents, newcomers can be more flexible because they face no trade-offs with the existing activities.”  

-Michael Porter 

Step 5: Develop Strategy 

What is your company doing that is different from your rivals?

Step five can be summed up as Position & Pattern. There is a lot we can go into here, so I will cover some key concepts to generate a competitive advantage, companies must invest in developing differentiated experience designs. 

“The essence of strategy is the in the activities - choosing to perform activities differently or to perform different activities than rivals.”  

- Micheal Porter

“Competitive strategy is about being different.  It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value… A company can outperform rivals only if it can establish a difference that it can preserve.”  

-Michael Porter 

Activities consist of everything companies do to provide value to their customers/users. “Activities” correlate to experience design touchpoints (i.e. digital business activities).

 Key Strategy Concepts: 

• Value Proposition:  Your value proposition defines the kind of value your company will create for its customers. Finding a unique value proposition usually involves a new way of segmenting the market. 

• Value Chain:  The set of activities that an organization carries out to create value for its customers.

• Positioning / Competitive Differentiation: A strategic position means performing different activities from rivals or performing similar activities differently. 

• Fit:  Your strategic fit creates a competitive advantage and superior profitability. Making sure the different parts of the ecosystem are consistent, reinforcing, and optimally orchestrated - if crucial. “Fit locks our imitators by creating a chain that is strong as its strongest link.”  - Michael Porter

• Trade-offs: Focusing effort and resources on a strategic position means leaving other positions and options behind. “A strategic position is not sustainable unless there are trade-offs with other positions… a trade-off means that more of one thing necessitates less of another”  - Michael Porter

Experience Strategy involves orchestrating a system of consistent experience components, not simply miscellaneous interactions, which brings forth competitive advantage in the way these components fit and align with one another to create real value for the customer.

Step 6: Communicate the strategy

Find a concise and memorable way to tell the story that explains your strategy.

The most important part of communicating your strategy is making it a “shared” set of goals that everyone in the organization can feel part of, and they can clearly see how it achieves the “shared vision”. Strategies and visions fail not because they are not carefully laid out but because of lost momentum due to the focus on day-to-day fires being put out and misaligned priorities between the company team functions. Organizations need to provide time for their people to move away from their daily tasks to focus on the future, challenge the strategy, and even change the shared vision if needed.

Artifacts and deliverables to help with the communication:

• Explain and draw clear connections between how Experience Strategy produces business results.

• Create a statement of overarching strategy

• Define objectives and concepts to clarify strategy

• Artifacts of customer model, personas, and quantification.

• Map of the current experience with target opportunities, and pain points along with a vision for a future state.

• A Strategy scorecard with KPIs and metrics

• A Feature roadmap

Conclusion

There are many reasons why an organization does not have a clear Experience Strategy, and one of them is that defining one is hard to do, especially if it has never been attempted before. These six steps can help you or your company on the path to an Experience Strategy and communicate it in a way that helps make design decisions that fit the strategy.

Experience Strategy can be a new way of thinking for some companies, and even a big culture shift. However, long-term thinking and ensuring that every function of the company has the same destination is crucial for sustainability.

Please reach out to me for a copy of the six steps to communicate them with your company, your company needs an Experience Strategist.

Thanks!

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