Chapter Four: Visualizing What You Know

I coached a newly formed product trio who was tasked with an outcome for the first time. Their product required a long application process that some customers neglected to complete. This team’s outcome was to increase the rate of application submissions. Each member of the trio had their own idea about what was preventing customers from submitting their application. And each person brought a unique set of knowledge and experiences to the trio. The product manager had been with the company for a couple of years but was new to the product-manager role. The designer was the company’s new Vice President of Design and joined a trio to get an on-the-ground view of how the company worked. The engineer had the longest tenure at the company but had little discovery experience.

In the previous chapter, you learned that, to chart the best path to a desired outcome, you need to discover and map out the opportunity space. However, the opportunity space is infinite. You can’t just dive in. You’ll quickly get lost. To make sense of the opportunity space, we first need to take an inventory of what we already know. This is especially critical on cross-functional teams, where each member brings a diverse set of knowledge and experiences.

When working with an outcome for the first time, it can feel overwhelming to know where to start. It helps to first map out your customers’ experience as it exists today. This trio started by mapping out what they thought was preventing their customers from submitting their applications. But they didn’t do so by getting together in a room to discuss what they knew. Instead, they started out with each product-trio member mapping out their own perspective. This was uncomfortable at first. The designer had little context for what might be going wrong. The engineer had a lot of technical knowledge but had little firsthand contact with customers. The product manager had some hunches as to what was going wrong but didn’t have any analytics to confirm those hunches. They each did the best they could.

Once they had each created their individual map, they took the time to explore each other’s perspectives. The product manager had the best grasp of the “known” challenges—the customer complaints that made their way to their call center and through support tickets. The designer missed a few steps in the process but did a great job of capturing the confusion and insecurity that the customer might be feeling in the process. Because he was new to the company, he was able to view the application process from an outsider’s perspective. The engineer’s map accurately captured the process and added detail about how one step informed another step. This uncovered insights into how a customer might get derailed if an earlier step had been completed incorrectly.

Each map represented a unique perspective—together they represented a much richer understanding of the opportunity space they intended to explore. The trio quickly worked to merge their unique perspectives into a shared experience map that better reflected what they collectively knew. Their map wasn’t set in stone. They knew that it contained hunches and possibilities, not truth. But it gave them a clear starting point. They had made explicit what they thought they knew, where they had open questions, and what they needed to vet in their upcoming customer interviews.

This chapter will teach you how to use your desired outcome as a starting point to work your way—first individually, and then as a team—to an experience map that reflects what you know about your customers’ experience today. You’ll learn to visualize your own perspective, explore the perspectives of your teammates, and then use the myriad of perspectives to co-create a shared team understanding. This shared map will guide your customer interviews, and it will help give structure to the opportunity space. It can and should evolve week over week as your team learns about your customers.