Set the Scope of Your Experience Map

To get started, you’ll want to first set the scope of your experience map. If you start jotting down everything you know about your customer, you’ll quickly get overwhelmed. Instead, start with your desired outcome. The trio in the opening story was trying to increase application submissions, so they mapped out what they thought their customers’ experience was as they filled out the application. They specifically focused on this question: “What’s preventing our customers from completing their application today?” Their outcome constrained what they tried to capture.

Think strategically about how broad or narrow to set the scope. When a team is focused on an optimization outcome, like increasing application submissions, it’s fine to define the scope narrowly. However, when working on a more open-ended outcome, you’ll want to expand the scope of your experience map.

For example, if we worked at a streaming-entertainment company (e.g., Netflix, Hulu) and we were tasked with an outcome like “increase the average minutes watched,” we might set our scope broadly: “How do customers entertain themselves today?” With this scope, we might capture everything we know about how customers choose, engage with, and consume streaming entertainment. But given the scope of the question, we might also capture what we know about their behavior when socializing with friends, attending sporting events and concerts, reading books, and playing video games. This might be the right scope, if we are looking to explore adjacent markets. But for most teams, this scope is too broad.

However, we don’t want to define our scope too narrowly, either. If we define our scope as “How do customers entertain themselves using our service?” we rule out any inspiration we might get from how they use other streaming-entertainment services, how they entertain themselves through their cable or satellite-dish packages, or how they entertain themselves through services like Twitch and YouTube. If, however, we define our scope as “How do customers entertain themselves with video?” we constrain the scope, but not too much.

Now you could easily argue that the scope should be “How do customers entertain themselves with video, music, and video games?” Or even, “How do customers entertain themselves online?” These options could all work. There’s not one right scope. The key is to have a conversation as a team about the scope that gives you room to explore while staying focused on your outcome. Once you’ve defined the scope of your experience map, you are ready to take an inventory of your individual knowledge before working to develop a shared understanding of what you collectively know.