CHAPTER 7
Identifying Opportunities
Opportunities Are Not Solutions
Opportunities, Intent, and Timing
CHAPTER 7 WORKSHOP: Opportunity Identification and Prioritization
When you look across the range of experiences that people have in their journeys, patterns will emerge. You will see commonalities in what people need and how they want to interact. You will also discover many gaps and inconsistencies in how your organization supports those needs, behaves in different channels, and provides clear pathways. In short, you will see missed opportunities to provide value and a lack of coherence in experience across time and space.
Understanding merely sets the stage for action. How do you and your colleagues determine where to focus and when? You begin with identifying opportunities rigorously and collaboratively.
Opportunities Are Not Solutions
Let’s get this out of the way: opportunities are not solutions. Humans are natural problem solvers, and this instinct makes it easy in corporate environments to jump quickly to how to do something while skipping over what you are trying to solve. Stop us if you have heard this one before:
You learn in your research that customers feel the onboarding experience takes too long. It’s one of many insights, but it sticks out as a problem ripe for addressing. Immediately your colleagues start discussing how to reduce the number of screens. The logic: fewer screens equal less time; less time equals happy customers. Discussions turn into whiteboard sketches and requirements, and before you know it, a solution is on the fast track to execution.
This scenario plays out over and over in product and service teams: one business metric or a perceived customer pain point leading to hasty decisions while obfuscating better opportunities to improve or innovate an experience. In our example, the opportunity is defined cursorily as “How might we reduce the number of screens?” This narrow frame ignores other insights into customer needs and closes off the possibility of exploring other solutions.
It may seem obvious, but the road to bad product and service experiences is littered with solutions delivered without first asking: “What’s the real opportunity here?”
What Is an Opportunity?
An opportunity is a set of circumstances ripe for creating positive change. Change can mean soothing customer pain points, extending your product or service to address unmet needs, or radically rethinking how those needs are met. Opportunities provide the fertile ground to create new value for an organization, its customers, and other stakeholders.
Identifying and prioritizing these opportunities should be done collaboratively and with rigor. The various sensemaking techniques from previous chapters can inform your understanding of organizational capabilities, customer needs, and the greater context that your product or service exists within. Based on these insights, opportunities can be framed properly to generate multiple ideas and potential solutions. This process ensures that you and your team frame the problem space accurately before imagining, much less making, possible solutions.
Orchestrating experiences means breaking away from business-as-usual, jump-to-a-solution approaches. It’s about embracing collaboration and creating true alignment to focus on the needs of customers and the most important opportunities that will serve the entire organization.
Take Airbnb as an example. The genesis for the popular home-sharing service wasn’t a reaction to business or technology trends but out of necessity. In 2007, founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia found themselves short on money to pay for their rising San Francisco rent.1 They knew hundreds of people were coming to the city for a conference in a city where hotel rooms were scarce and expensive. They recognized a real opportunity that they could potentially solve: supplementing their income by helping others stay for cheap. Chesky and Gebbia’s initial solution was a marketing website, three airbeds, and a home-cooked breakfast. Since then, Airbnb has evolved from a small experiment to a sophisticated set of services around the travel journey, but the company’s success initially occurred because it identified the opportunity of aligning host and guest needs.
Every context has its own unique forces that could influence what separates true opportunities from red herrings. In the case of Airbnb, geography, economics, and the founders’ skills proved to be the right conditions to identify and solve for a real opportunity to create value. In general, there are three key requirements to check off when defining opportunities: value alignment, multiple possible futures, and the ability and resolve to change (see Figure 7.1).
FIGURE 7.1
The three facets of opportunities.
Value Alignment
Value creation is a cornerstone of many ideologies making their way into large organizations. Value stream mapping, for example, is a lean approach for identifying and eliminating activities that result in operational waste in the delivery of products and services. In the context of orchestrating experiences, designers similarly put an emphasis on ensuring that activities—which are instantiated as touchpoints—provide a clear value.
In business-centric organizations, the answers to these types of questions can be shallow or one-dimensional. Customers will be happy because the application will take less time. Call center employees will be happy to deal with fewer unhappy customers. And, of course, the company will be happier if the Net Promoter Score increases. It’s necessary to help your colleagues dig deeper.
It is important to clearly define and measure the business value of solutions, but a focus on experience means shifting the discussion from business value to co-value. Co-value means evaluating opportunities and solutions by how they will benefit all relevant stakeholders, not just the business. Overhauling an online application may increase conversions and decrease acquisition costs, but what value should be delivered to the applicant or to the employees who support acquiring and serving new customers? How would you define the opportunity differently from each stakeholder’s perspective, not just the interests of “the business” (see Figure 7.2)?
FIGURE 7.2
Look beyond business value to evaluate potential opportunities.
Applying a co-value lens to the process of identifying and prioritizing opportunities is a critical practice to shift to a human-centered mindset in an organization. Also important is an iterative approach—from research to opportunities and from solution definition through execution. The concepts and methods outlined in previous chapters will help you and your team change the conversation about value. Here’s a quick review:
• Touchpoints and touchpoint inventories: Evaluate current touchpoints or define new touchpoints by how they create value for the business, customers, and other stakeholders.
• Ecosystems and ecosystem mapping: Understand how different actors view, seek, and create value.
• Journeys and experience mapping: Identify gaps in the value that customers seek and what current solutions deliver at different stages and moments of the end-to-end experiences.
• Experience principles: Write guidelines for defining and making solutions attuned to customer needs and value while aligning with brand values.
Multiple Possible Futures
An opportunity should lend itself to many possible solutions. Let’s return to our onboarding example, but this time with a better framing and outcome:
You learn in your research that customers feel the onboarding experience takes too long. This feeling applies to customers whose time to onboard varies from hours to days. Other insights from research reveal a lack of communication at key points that increase customer frustration, as well as a general confusion regarding the steps and information required to onboard. It’s clear there is a more systemic problem at play. As a result, you and your team frame the opportunity as “How might we help get customers up and running easily and confidently?”
As shown by this example, the framing of opportunities is critical to focus creativity and problem solving. The opportunity should be defined and worded to serve as a springboard to multiple possibilities, not an anchor to a specific solution (see Figure 7.3). Later sections of this chapter will walk you through how to frame opportunities properly with your colleagues.
FIGURE 7.3
Well-framed opportunities should inspire multiple possible solutions.
Ability and Resolve to Change
Even when there’s an opportunity to create co-value in multiple ways, you must always do a gut check of whether your organization can affect change and has the resolve to do so. This can be tricky.
When orchestrating experiences, challenging business as usual is part of the game. You will identify potential opportunities that often require people to partner in new ways across organizational silos. You will need your colleagues to be open to reframing success from opportunities that they alone can own within their respective silos to ones that call for collaboration and shared ownership. Building rapport and partnerships with key stakeholders will help create the conditions to be able to affect change when you see an opportunity.
Breaking down silos helps open new possibilities, but you and your colleagues will need to be clear-eyed and recognize that conditions will never be ideal. Thus, you will need to identify any true constraints within your problem space. If you can take action, there’s an opportunity. If you cannot take action—that is, if you cannot change something—it is a constraint. Seize your opportunities; embrace your constraints.2
In the context of orchestrating experiences, some examples of constraints might include:
• Your business strategy
• Regulatory rules that govern your activities and offerings
• Entities and events outside of your control, such as third-party services
• Risk tolerance
• Organizational structures, where stakeholders may be risk averse in co-owning outputs
You may have opportunities to work within or around constraints, but it helps to understand the difference when it comes time to create a plan of action for how to improve the end-to-end experience. For example, your insights may tell you that your customers don’t like giving their Social Security number during the application process because it makes them suspicious. However, for regulatory reasons, you cannot process the application without that information. You may then identify an opportunity to reframe or otherwise reposition the collection of this information. In this instance, you’ve done something important in identifying the constraint—and, instead of dismissing the insight as something you cannot change, you’ve created an opportunity.
Opportunities, Intent, and Timing
Value alignment, multiple possible futures, and the ability to change ultimately reflect the unique context of an organization and its ecosystem. When shifting an organization’s mindset from individual touchpoints to customer journeys, it’s critical to be clear on your overall intent and when you will take action.
There are three useful categories for defining and connecting opportunities to orchestrate end-to-end experiences better. They are the following:
• Optimize the end-to-end experience: Connect disparate moments into a connected system of channels and touchpoints.
• Reimagine the end-to-end experience: Extend the product or service experience to address unmet customer needs while emphasizing consistency and cohesion.
• Innovate from the ground up: Create new product and services designed as orchestrated end-to-end experiences.3
Optimize the End-to-End Experience
Any existing product or service experience typically has many opportunities for improvement. This should not be a surprise. Left to their own devices, different functional teams—marketing, product, design, technology, and operations—will have their own vision and priorities for optimizing within their area of responsibility. The interdependency of these silos means well-intentioned point solutions likely will cause issues elsewhere in the customer’s overall experience.
One common example: the lack of coordination between marketing and product or service teams. As a consumer, you have probably experienced a phenomenon that Brandon Schauer has labeled the service anticipation gap.4 Marketing’s traditional role is to create desire and anticipation for what a product or service will provide. Far too often, however, the delivered solution reflects a separation of vision, coordination, and execution among internal teams who support the same customer journey. For instance, imagine an airline that pours money into advertising a friendly flying experience but delivers poor experiences across checking in, boarding, and in-flight experience. How much revenue and customer happiness could be realized by connecting these dots, even incrementally?
Orchestrating experiences means changing this paradigm. It shines a light on numerous customer pain points hiding in plain sight once you frame customer engagement as an end-to-end experience to be designed collaboratively. The methods of this book—touchpoint inventories, experience mapping, and so on—support an important piece of work for modern organizations: optimizing the end-to-end experience.
Beyond Pain Points
Optimization in this context means systematically overhauling an existing product or service journey to be more consistent, cohesive, and complete. These changes often don’t mean major new investments, but rather smarter use of existing or planned investments by orchestrating activities across teams. A few common examples:
• Removing customer touchpoints that add no value
• Changing existing touchpoints to work better as a system
• Creating new touchpoints that support core customer needs better
• Extending touchpoints into more appropriate channels
• Building better bridges between channels and contexts
• Applying common experience principles to all parts of the end-to-end experience
• Creating stronger starts and ends to a customer journey
• Attacking a low point and amplifying a high point
• Cooperating across silos to have different channels work together to serve a touchpoint
• Creating a smoother transition between journey stages
Many of these opportunities represent low-hanging fruit—many bumps in a customer’s journey that can be corrected with small investments yet cumulatively produce a positive uplift in experience. Others may require more rigor to balance trade-offs across functional areas in support of the overall customer journey. And some opportunities may lead to new product or service touchpoints that meet existing customer needs more effectively.
For example, Rail Europe International found that customers greatly valued the current ability to build travel plans across different rail travel providers without having to go to multiple sites (see Figure 7.4). However, customers still found difficulty in creating itineraries because they could not visualize the physical locations of stations and other places they wanted to visit. Instead of jumping from booking site to booking site, they were juggling one booking site with maps, guidebooks, and other resources. This represented an immediate opportunity—they asked, “How might we help travelers visualize space and time more clearly when planning itineraries?” Overall, optimizing an end-to-end experience means shifting from improving touchpoints in isolation to designing the whole customer journey as a coordinated team.
COURTESY OF ADAPTIVE PATH
FIGURE 7.4
Optimization opportunities identified for Rail Europe.
Reimagine the Experience
Beyond optimization, there are opportunities for expanding or reimagining experiences to address a wider set of unmet customer needs. Here, the focus is not on which current customer touchpoints need to be improved or better connected, but on identifying opportunities to deliver new value. Opportunities that lead to reimagining parts or all of the end-to-end experience often result in new investments in people, processes, and technology. For this reason, an organization must do its homework to feel confident that acting upon these opportunities individually or in concert will likely create appropriate returns on investment for relevant stakeholders.
As noted in previous chapters, both ecosystem and experience mapping can reveal valuable insights into opportunities to solve for unmet needs. There are a few common patterns.
• Ignored or underserved journey stages. Many products and services are designed to support only use cases divorced from a greater context. For example, visiting a museum includes more than just experiencing the exhibits. The journey stages before and after offer great opportunities to provide new value and extend the museum experience.
• Not serving the greater journey. Instead of optimizing a current end-to-end experience, new opportunities may exist in a higher level of journey. Airbnb started with a focus on guests staying with hosts. Today, they focus on the overarching travel journey to provide more extensive value and differentiated experiences.
• Unaddressed actors. Ecosystem mapping often brings greater focus on other people that matter in a problem space. A common example is people—partners, family or friends, or third parties—who are part of the decision-making process. For example, in home buying, realtors may represent a new opportunity for engagement.
Reimagining goes well beyond the surface layer of an experience. The objective is to determine systematically how to redefine a portion or all of the why, what, and how of a product’s service. This includes:
• The strategic rationale and intent (why)
• The value that will be created for stakeholders (why)
• A vision for the end-to-end customer experience (what)
• The role of different people, touchpoints, channels, processes, and technologies (what)
• A plan for how to evolve to the vision over time (how)
• The design and implementation of touchpoints and operations (how)
Innovate from the Ground Up
One of the tougher areas to identify involves opportunities to create innovative experiences while innovating with new business models. By default, this is where start-ups usually take advantage of an approach of orchestrating experiences. They don’t have a mature offering to optimize or extend. Instead, they are hoping to innovate or disrupt an existing system.
A good example of new product and service innovation is UberEats (see Figure 7.5). Uber’s core service—transporting people from A to B—was built upon a sophisticated infrastructure that orchestrated the just-in-time movement of vehicles across geographies. Much of Uber’s value is this platform, and the company has been looking for new ways to leverage it. In 2015, Uber began experimenting with food delivery. While delivering food instead of people involves pick-up and arrival common in their core service, new challenges needed to be solved from orchestrating restaurant and food selection, to meal preparation, to partner management, and to drivers leaving their cars to complete the process.
FIGURE 7.5
The end-to-end UberEats experience was prototyped and piloted in three months.
To get a pilot in place quickly, an Uber team held a service design innovation workshop with colleagues to dig deeper into opportunities for providing a complete food delivery end-to-end experience.5 These workshops then led to ethnographic research to understand the food delivery ecosystem: customers, restaurant employees, and drivers. With better insights in hand, the team was able to concept, design, and launch a service pilot (bootstrapped to the existing Uber ride app) in three months. Several iterations later, UberEats has evolved to a full service operating in dozens of cities with a stand-alone app.
Unlike startups, more established companies spend a great deal of time and energy on optimizing what currently exists. While these incremental improvements keep the train running, we have observed innovation teams center their efforts on new technologies or external competitive threats, not the needs of people and their experiences over time and space. Getting a cross-functional team aligned around a better understanding of both the ecosystem and journeys of customers primes the pump for rethinking how things are done.
The HomePlus case study from Chapter 3, “Exploring Ecosystems,” is a good example of this. HomePlus did not simply try to improve the existing experience of going to the supermarket. They looked at their ecosystem with fresh eyes and found alignment with a common journey with which they could align—the daily commute. The resulting solution leveraged many of the operations needed for home grocery delivery wrapped in a unique shopping experience that required minimum behavioral change from customers.
In the end, organizations need to balance efforts and investments in experience across all three categories of opportunities. If you own or contribute to the end-to-end experience within a specific problem space, you should always ask these questions:
• What opportunities do we have to optimize the end-to-end experience to meet the needs of all stakeholders better?
• What opportunities are there to reimagine parts of the customer journey to create new value?
• What opportunities exist to disrupt how we and our customers could frame our relationships and the values we exchange?
AMAZON AND THE NEXT HORIZON
Amazon may be the paragon of identifying opportunities across all three categories. Amazon is known for optimizing every part of their experience. They also reimagine how their customers engage with that shopping experience, from introducing Amazon 1-Click, to extending the ecosystem beyond their digital channels, such as creating dash buttons for buying products as needed and in the context of when that need occurs (for example, buying detergent when your machine runs out). With AWS (Amazon Web Services), they identified the opportunity to take existing technical and data infrastructure investment and turn it into a whole new business—turning a cost center into a profit center. They rethought the actors in the journey, and they are constantly owning more parts of the shipping experience. Kindle, Prime, Echo, drone delivery, and so on—they are on a constant, obsessive mission to identify opportunities to optimize, reimagine, and reinvent.
Many approaches exist to identify and compare opportunities. The next section outlines a common design strategy approach for codifying opportunities as “How Might We?” questions. Techniques for prioritizing opportunities are also provided.
Identifying Opportunities
For identifying opportunities for end-to-end experiences, the overarching philosophies of the book apply to this step of the process:
• Look holistically across customer types, channels, touchpoints, and the context beyond your product or service.
• Perform qualitative research to make sense of your customers’ needs, personal ecosystems, and experiences.
• Leverage touchpoint inventories, ecosystem maps, and experience maps to synthesize and communicate your growing understanding of your customers’ broader journeys and discrete interactions with your product or service.
• Work collaboratively across functions throughout your sensemaking to create alignment and collective understanding.
Labeling Opportunities
Invitation stems—commonly called, “How Might We?” prompts—are an effective technique for framing opportunities. Pioneered in the 1960s by Dr. Sydney J. Parnes,6 “How Might We?” prompts encourage lateral thinking and increase the quantity of possible ideas by posing questions. For example, if you have observed a pain point during customer onboarding, you could pose: “How might we make the onboarding process more efficient or steps clearer for customers?”
The key to crafting “How Might We?” prompts is to avoid going too broad or too narrow. Specifically, you should pull out any language that steers toward a narrower set of solutions. Table 7.1 shows some poor examples and how to reframe them.
As shown in these examples, you should avoid embedding solutions—such as specifying the channel, medium, touchpoint, or means (e.g., training)—in your prompts. They should inspire open brainstorming and idea generation well beyond the obvious.
TABLE 7.1 CREATING GOOD HOW MIGHT WE? STATEMENTS
Poor |
Better |
How might we create better aisle signage to help customers find products more easily? |
How might we help customers find products more easily while in the aisles? |
How might we use a mobile app to help customers keep doing product research when they leave the store? |
How might we help customers continue their product research when they leave the store? |
How might employees be trained to be more welcoming? |
How might we provide a better sense of welcome when entering? |
How might we educate customers in a graphical way on why it takes so long to do a return? |
How might we set and manage customer expectations better when returning merchandise? |
Prioritizing Opportunities
Numerous prioritization methods exist in design, business, product, and innovation literature. You can use simple methods—such as dot voting or the MoSCoW method7—to get a rough feel, but when possible, use an approach that uses at least two criteria to assess your opportunities. The criteria you use should be based on your strategic focus—optimization, reimagining, or innovation—and be clear to all participants. Here are two prioritization methods to consider for different contexts (optimization, imagination, or innovation). A third prioritization method—impact vs. complexity—that can also be used to prioritize opportunities is covered at the end of Chapter 8, “Generating and Evaluating Ideas.”
Value vs. Urgency (Optimization or Reimagination)
Optimization efforts typically focus on immediate to near-term actions that you can take to address specific metrics related to your product’s or service’s end-to-end experience. Your objective in this exercise is to assess each opportunity against the co-value it could produce and how urgent it is to solve for sooner rather than later.
Optimization efforts typically focus on immediate to near-term actions that you can take to address specific metrics related to your product’s or service’s end-to-end experience. This technique assesses each opportunity against the co-value it could produce and how urgent it is to solve for sooner rather than later. Figure 7.6 illustrates a simple model you can use to visualize and plot your analysis. The workshop following this chapter provides an example of how to use this method with your colleagues.
FIGURE 7.6
Prioritizing against value and urgency.
Satisfaction vs. Importance (Reimagining and Innovation)
This approach works best when part or all of your focus is smoothing out the rough edges of the end-to-end experience. In this case, timing or effort is less important than identifying opportunities to provide value outside of your current product or service paradigm. Uber’s extension into food delivery and Airbnb’s push into the broader travel experience are two good examples of this situation.
In this exercise, you will use a modified version of Opportunity Scoring from Anthony Ulwick’s Outcome-Driven Innovation methodology.8 Using a scale of 1 to 10 for both satisfaction and importance, discuss and rate each opportunity from the perspective of your customers. How ripe is the opportunity for a new solution? Did you learn in your research that other products and solutions already meet customers’ needs? As you discuss, plot your items visually against the model illustrated in Figure 7.7.
FIGURE 7.7
Opportunity scoring assesses opportunities against importance and satisfaction.9
For this method to work, you will need to have your insights from research handy to represent your customers’ needs and perceptions of how well existing products and services meet those needs. This means it’s critical to design your research to surface undermet and unmet needs within your customer base (or in new customer segments that you want to serve). Of the frameworks covered in Chapters 1–4, ecosystem maps are especially useful for this type of opportunity identification and prioritization. Ecosystem maps include products, services, and other people and things that customers may already turn to. For example, potential UberEats customers may already use food delivery services, so research into that space may reveal opportunities in portions of the journey that are more underserved than others.
Communicating Opportunities
At some point, you and your colleagues will be ready to share more broadly the opportunities that you have discovered and prioritized. Here are a few approaches that you can use to get buy-in on priorities and to prepare your organization to jump smartly and confidently into solution mode.
• Opportunity cards: Making each opportunity, or recommendation, into discreet items helps break down some of the high-level critical details for the opportunity, such as channel or LOB ownership and key dependencies (see Figure 7.8). Just as important, it allows you to tie it specifically to the things that lead to the opportunity: the business value or customer need that was identified. This can provide traceability for people who become aware of the opportunity who weren’t a part of the past work. Other stakeholders can see the justification for prioritizing this opportunity.
COURTESY OF ADAPTIVE PATH
FIGURE 7.8
Opportunity cards are often half sheet (A5) or quarter sheet (A6) that provide some detail on dependencies or traceability for how you arrived at this opportunity.
• Opportunities by stage: Organize your opportunities by stage of customer journey or across two or more stages. (See Figure 7.12 in the workshop at the end of this chapter.)
• Experience map annotation: An alternate approach to show opportunities by stage involves taking your experience map and annotating it with your opportunities. You can call out the opportunities in a separate section of your map. Or you can create a version of your map fading back to the current state and overlaying your opportunities.
• Opportunities by channel and stage: You may have many opportunities that, regardless of how they are solved, apply to specific channels. In this situation, using a framework like a touchpoint inventory—channels as rows and journey stages as columns—will highlight the recommended focus in different channels across the end-to-end experience.
• Opportunity map: An opportunity map categorizes opportunities by theme and often includes other insights or information, such as experience principles (see Figure 7.9). This type of artifact provides stakeholders with an at-a-glance view of where design intervention can create better experiences and new value. The opportunity map can then support determining which opportunities to pursue, when to go after them, and which aspects of the customer journey would be impacted.
FIGURE 7.9
An opportunity map Chris and his team created at Adaptive Path for an energy sector client.
• Ecosystem opportunities: Similarly, an ecosystem map can be annotated with opportunities to show how new or reimagined products, services, other entities, or relationships can create new value.
One approach to visualizing your opportunities usually does not communicate the full story that you need to tell. Look to combine vantage points, such as by journey and by ecosystems, to help people see what you and your colleagues see—the best opportunities to create more value and better end-to-end customer experiences.
CHAPTER 7 WORKSHOP OPPORTUNITY IDENTIFICATION AND PRIORITIZATION
This workshop leverages your experience maps, experience principles, and other sensemaking artifacts to identify and prioritize opportunities. Hopefully, you have involved a broad range of stakeholders in your discovery and research. Regardless, it is critical to have cross-functional representation in this workshop to ensure that you align around the most important opportunities and get broad commitment for action.
Workshop Objectives
• Identify opportunities based on customer needs across the end-to-end experience.
• Prepare your opportunities for ideation sessions.
• Prioritize your opportunities to determine what to act on now vs. later.
Example Pitch to Participants
This workshop provides an important bridge from research to ideation and action. Here’s some language to encourage the right people to attend and play:
While we’re never done learning from our customers, it’s time to use our new insights to determine opportunities for creating better experiences and value.
In this workshop, we will use our experience map(s) as a tool to identify and codify opportunities for optimizing (in the near term) and reimagining (in the long term) our customers’ end-to-end experiences. This process will include prioritizing opportunities based on their value and urgency. The output of this work will then be used in other sessions to generate ideas for seizing these opportunities together.
Agenda
This workshop typically takes a full day to complete, including breaks and lunch. In practice, you may want to schedule a second day (and possibly a third) to conduct some initial ideation immediately. See the workshop in Chapter 8, “Generating and Evaluating Ideas,” for an approach that complements this workshop nicely.
TABLE 7.2 WORKSHOP AGENDA
Activity |
Description |
Duration |
Introductions |
Facilitate participants getting to know one another beyond just names and titles. |
10 min |
Review agenda and objectives |
Review the activities for the day and what you want to accomplish by the end of the session. |
10 min |
Share key insights |
Go back over the key insights from research and make sure that everyone is familiar with your experience map(s) and principles. |
45 min |
Break |
Recharge! |
15 min |
Pull out the needs |
Identify key customer needs by journey stage. |
60 min |
Identify opportunities |
Identify and advocate for opportunities that should be addressed. |
75 min |
Lunch |
Eat up! |
45 min |
Cluster opportunities and label categories |
Find patterns in the opportunities and craft “How Might We?” prompts. |
90 min |
Document opportunities |
Flesh out the opportunities and document them on opportunity cards. |
60 min |
Break |
Rest up for the final push. |
15 min |
Prioritize opportunities |
Rate and prioritize opportunities using a framework, such as value vs. urgency. |
105 min |
Reflect and determine next steps |
Reflect upon the workshop process and outcomes. Determine the next steps. |
10 min |
Roles
• Lead facilitator: Workshop host and main facilitator for session activities
• Co-facilitator(s): Help(s) set up, break down, and assist in activities
• Documentarian: Takes photographs of the session to help nonparticipants understand the collaborative process
Participants
• Facilitators and experience mappers from research
• Owners of specific channels, products, or touchpoints
• Practitioners from relevant teams, such as branding, operations, design, and technology
Artifacts
• A large, poster-size printout of each experience map
• A tabloid-size version of your map for each participant
• Other relevant artifacts (ecosystem maps, personas, and touchpoint inventories)
• Experience principles (posted by your map and handouts for each participant)
• Opportunity cards
Materials
• Small flag sticky notes
• Sharpies
• Square sticky notes
• Painter’s tape (for the butcher paper or creating the journey framework)
• Self-stick easel pad or butcher paper (to create a wall canvas)
Preparing for the Workshop
Opportunities result from interpreting what you have learned and placing it within the context of your organizational goals and business strategy. When inviting colleagues to collaborate in identifying opportunities, you need to communicate this context explicitly. Be clear on whether you are focusing on optimization, reimagining, innovation, or some combination of the three.
Send out a summary of your key research insights and an overview of the workshop’s agenda as a pre-read for your colleagues. This will help them hit the ground running in the workshop.
An important note about the experience map(s) that you use in the session: your map is a draft, not final. Test its usefulness and usability in the workshop. Once you understand its effectiveness, you should then update your map for future use.
Running the Workshop
During the workshop, you will guide participants from a high-level understanding of your key insights to an initial pass at prioritizing opportunities derived from those insights. We recommend breaking down this agenda into five distinct activities:
• Share key insights and strategic context
• Pull out customer needs
• Identify opportunities
• Cluster opportunities and label opportunities
• Document opportunities
• Prioritize opportunities
Share Key Insights and Strategic Context
If you have regularly engaged your colleagues in sensemaking and creating experience principles, this step can be a brief review. Go back over the key insights from research, walk through your latest version of your experience map, and make sure that everyone is familiar with your experience principles. Distribute duties for presenting these items to other attendees who participated in the research in order to get people engaged and collaborative.
In addition to reviewing your insights, remind everyone again of the context and any constraints that should be honored in the session. For example, you may have been asked to recommend improvements to an existing product or service to be implemented in the next six months. Or your goal might be to inform strategies and investments 12–18 months in the future. This context is critical because your collaborators might define an opportunity as something they could address the next spring, next quarter, or next year.
Pull Out Customer Needs
After you feel you have a good baseline understanding, break your participants into small teams. How you organize the teams depends upon a few factors. Some rules of thumb to keep in mind:
• If you have customer personas representing distinct behaviors and needs within your customer base, group participants by persona. Arm each group with specific maps that you have created to document these journeys.
• Each group should include someone who knows the research insights well. Your experience mappers will come in handy here.
• Create groups with a mix of roles, levels, and functions to stoke cross-functional collaboration.
Ask each team to review their experience map in detail and identify key customer needs by stage. Each need should be written on an individual sticky note. For example, a few needs that could emerge from an investing journey might be:
• A basic understanding of different investment products
• A clear explanation of how to open an account in laymen’s terms
• A comparison of easy options
• The confidence to choose the best option for the customer’s needs
• The access to account information 24/7
Then have the teams share out the needs that they have identified and place them below your poster-size map (see Figure 7.10). As the participants share out, cluster the needs that are alike. By the end of the activity, you should have a collection of needs that customers have within and across stages. Label your clusters and move on to identify your opportunities.
FIGURE 7.10
Identifying customer needs across the end-to-end experience.
Identify Opportunities
In this activity, each participant will identify and advocate for opportunities that should be addressed. Give each participant a tabloid-sized experience map and three-to-five sticky flags (see Figure 7.11). (You can buy these long, rectangular flaps or simply cut square sticky notes into several flags.) The number of flags depends on the complexity of your experience and the number of participants. The fewer the flags, the more important it is for participants to make a selective choice. This constraint helps the opportunities with the most potential to create value or take action to rise to the top.
Next, review the criteria for what makes an opportunity: value alignment, multiple possible futures, and ability to change. Reinforce the relevant customer and business needs, as well as the constraints that you reviewed earlier. However, don’t worry about being too strict about constraints. You will resolve different perspectives on constraints when you prioritize later.
FIGURE 7.11
Pink flags identify opportunities. Blue flags indicate which experience principles might be applied to each journey stage.
Each person should review the map for 5–10 minutes, referencing additional insights, customer needs, and other information as needed. As participants identify opportunities, they should mark the opportunity area on their experience maps until they run out of flags.
What do opportunities look like? For this step in the exercise, they are simply anything related to the end-to-end experience that a participant believes should be addressed. Most participants’ flags will end up on a particular moment or touchpoint. But encourage participants to put them anywhere on the map: on an empathy quote, on a piece of data, or anywhere they believe is critical to address. Doing this individually helps to ensure that each person isn’t influenced by seeing what someone else (such as their boss) is doing.
Cluster Opportunities and Label Categories
As shown in Figure 7.11, next have each person share out their opportunities and place their flags on the larger experience map. Your role is to facilitate the discussion and help cluster similar opportunities on the map. Facilitate a dialogue on the patterns that emerged, making sure to review the outliers as well. Keep track of what emerges in the discussion in terms of the range of perspectives.
During this process, ask participants to discuss why that area of the journey should be addressed. Help the group articulate clearly what the opportunity is and why it matters. Referencing back to the needs discovered in your research and your experience principles will help ground the discussion in facts, not subjective preference. Also, steer them away from going into solution mode. For example, a travel experience team may have this type of interaction:
Facilitator: We have a cluster around checking into the hotel. Why is this a thing?”
Participant 1: Our research showed us there’s a high frustration level on checking in because it seems to take too long. Many people are so tired from their trip and just want to drop their bags in the room. And because they’re tired, they forget to ask questions about getting on Wi-Fi or where the workout room is— which annoys them later.
Facilitator: OK, I think we can all imagine different ways to solve this individually, but for now let’s identify or articulate what opportunities are here. It looks like there are more than one.
Participant 2: We need to make the checkout process faster for the guest.
Participant 1: At the very least, we should make checking in a more pleasant experience.
Participant 3: And how can we make sure they’re loaded up with all the information they need to have a good experience without slowing them down?
This isn’t atypical of how a discussion will go. You will hear a lot of “we need,” “we should,” “how can we”—and that’s good, because it means that people are thinking in terms of opportunities and not prescriptive solutions. Your job is to be alert and get these possible opportunities down and then make sure that you’re identifying them.
After reviewing and clustering further the proposed opportunities, codify what the clusters mean and label them on larger sticky notes using the How Might We? method (see earlier in the chapter). For small sets of opportunities, you can facilitate a group discussion to write them. For larger sets, assign small groups to craft How Might We? prompts for a subset of the opportunities.
You now have a first pass at all the key opportunities that stakeholders collectively believe could be worth pursuing. You may have a handful, or literally dozens of opportunities. There should be no constraints, at this point, to the number of opportunities you identify.
Document Opportunities
Your final task for the workshop is to take a first pass at prioritizing the opportunities. Previous activities in the workshop likely caused a bit of a mess with sticky notes everywhere. A good way to transition to your prioritization step is to transfer your opportunities to something a little more formal than a sticky note. Figure 7.12 shows a useful approach in which you create a simple opportunity card that is then placed on a simple journey framework. Each card has a space for your How Might We? prompt, as well as space to articulate the potential value of the opportunity. More on value in a moment, but start with having your participants collaborate on creating a card for each opportunity.
FIGURE 7.12
Preparing for prioritization.
Next, facilitate a discussion regarding the potential value that will be created going after each opportunity. If it is a small number of participants, you can work together on this. For larger groups, break into smaller teams to draft the value for each opportunity and then review and refine them together.
You should codify business value and customer value separately. You can also add spaces for employees or other stakeholders to analyze the value that they may receive. Table 7.3 gives an example of what these value statements might look like. At this stage, you do not need to be too precise in exact metrics or how much value would be returned quantitatively. When all the cards are filled in, place them back into your journey framework and get ready to prioritize.
TABLE 7.3 VALUE STATEMENTS
Stage |
Research |
How Might We . . . |
Help customers continue their product research when they leave the store? |
Business Value |
Reduce risk of losing customer to a competitor Potentially add incremental downstream revenue (purchases following research) Improve Net Promoter Scores Insights into customer decision patterns |
Customer Value |
Convenience Reduction of effort (not repeating previous research steps) |
Employee Value |
Less pressure to answer all product questions and close the customer sale in store |
Prioritize Opportunities
Finally, work as a team to prioritize the opportunities to get a feel for their relative value and your readiness to take action. Here’s how to do so using the value-urgency framework introduced earlier this chapter:
After a few iterations to ensure that your points are distributed accurately, your items will fall visually into a few different categories. Fast-track items in the upper-right quadrant have the highest priority, while ones in the bottom-left can be set aside for now. The remaining opportunities will need more discussion to determine when and if to address them. Typically, these opportunities should be taken forward in the process (ideation).
• Count your opportunities and calculate a total number of available points using this formula: Number of items x 3 (middle of a scale of 1 to 5) = total number of points. For example, if you have 20 opportunities to rate, then you have 60 value points and 60 urgency points to distribute (20 x 3 = 60).
• Using large sheets or butcher paper, create the value-urgency matrix on a wall (see Figure 7.13).
FIGURE 7.13
Collaborative mapping opportunities in a value-urgency matrix.
• Review each opportunity card, rating it on a scale of 1 to 5 for value. When discussing value, remember to assess each item on business, customer, and other relevant stakeholders.
• Next, plot each opportunity (again on a scale of 1 to 5) against how critical it is to go after it immediately or later in the future.
• Write the values on each opportunity card and keep track of your total points.
• Once everything is rated, see if you are over or under your target number. For example, you may have 60 points to distribute across 20 opportunities for value, but your total is 67. You would then go back through your opportunities and increase or decrease some of their values until they total 60.
This step can also be done in a separate session, especially if you want to expand the group to more colleagues who can help articulate and compare the value that each opportunity could bring to the organization, your customer, and other stakeholders. Keep in mind this is a first pass. You will likely need to have follow-up discussions with colleagues to finalize your prioritization.
After the Workshop
Following the workshop, iterate upon your opportunities and their relative priority. This could include additional discovery to further assess your criteria. For example, you may have some unresolved questions regarding the complexity of certain opportunities. Or you may decide to assess the importance and satisfaction of your opportunities from a qualitative standpoint. Make sure that you keep this process collaborative and get collective buy-in for your top priorities before moving on to explore potential solutions.