onepointtwoone

If you work in product, you should be reading Teresa Torres’ “Continuous Discovery Habits”. I’ve recently had the opportunity to put some of the theory from the book into action by creating an Experience Map at my new company, GooseChase, with a group of people who have never created an Experience Map before. If you’re in a similar situation, here are my tips on how we made our session successful and how it fed into the subsequent foundations of our continuous discovery process.

Sidebar - some background on GooseChase - we have built a platform for organisations like companies, schools or non-profits to create scavenger-hunt-inspired experiences for their teams or communities. Our customers use the platform to create a wide variety of experiences, from classroom learning activities to employee onboarding, team building or fundraising events.

What’s an experience map?

This post will make much more sense if you’ve already familiarised with the key concepts of Teresa’s Continuous Discovery framework, but just to recap, experience Maps are shorthand visual representations of a customer journey, that allows somebody to easily digest what a customer is going through without having to read walls of text! Why drawing maps helps sharpen thinking

What we were trying to do

As Head of Product, I wanted to run a remote workshop to create our first experience map - the other participants would be our Head of Design, CTO and CEO (who had the main day-to-day oversight of Product before I joined). The goal was to produce an experience map, relevant to our product outcome, that could help inform our Opportunity-Solution-Tree and provide a baseline visual for our customer journey that could be shared more widely across the team.

Preparing for the workshop

There were a few key pieces of preparation that helped make our workshop a success. The most important one was identifying a product outcome with the other participants that we felt supported our current primary business goal. For GooseChase, our current business goal is to improve subscriber retention and reduce churn. Our best subscribing customers are the ones that have multiple people in their organisation using our platform to create experiences more frequently. For that reason, we settled on a product outcome of increasing the average number of experiences created by our subscribing customers.

With the product outcome documented, I then spent some time alone, thinking about an appropriate constraint for our experience map that would help make the workshop run more smoothly. Too broad a constraint might make it hard for the group to start working on a blank canvas. Too tight a constraint and we may not visualise all the stages of the customer journey that would be beneficial. I ended up settling on a framing constraint for the experience map workshop of “How do our subscribing customers create experiences for their communities?” I wanted our group to consider the stages that our customers went through in imagining an experience they wanted to create, and how they would go about achieving that, including the touchpoint where our platform may or may not factor in to their thinking. We want our customers to understand where they could use GooseChase for use cases they maybe haven’t previously considered, so this constraint felt appropriate.

With a constraint set, I spent some time creating my own individual experience map. This gave me the opportunity to figure out the best tooling for the workshop and how best to put the theory in to practise. I realised that when assembling your experience map, there are two common approaches you could take:

Do it chronologically - it's sometimes easier to just start at the beginning of the journey and create visuals for each step.
Focus on key moments - however, it's often easier to picture what the key moments are, start with visualising those and then fill out the rest of the steps on either side.

The last bit of preparation I did was to use Miro to set up a board that I could use to run the workshop. I created some example visuals and left a set of components ready to copy and paste to assemble our map.

The only preparation the other participants had done in advance of the workshop was to read up to and including Chapter 4 of Continuous Discovery Habits, so they were already primed with the key concepts.

During the workshop

The workshop ran pretty smoothly. We only had a 90 minute slot available to us, but made use of it pretty well! We used Zoom for the video conferencing and as described before, Miro for the actual mapping. This is what we worked through:

Recapping context of the product outcome we are shooting for + some key passages about experience maps from the book that I’d highlighted in my initial read through. This took about 10-15 minutes.
Work through an experience map example as a group that had nothing to do with GooseChase. I facilitated this - I had chosen an example of “Making your way home after a night out with friends”. We went round the group, suggesting key points to visualise on our example map. The initial ideas were all to do with the early part of the journey, essentially how someone would decide what method of transport to take home. To constrain this example map to make it more meaningful in the time we had, I asked the group to assume that a ride-sharing app of some sort was chosen as the mode of transport. From there, the group came up with several great steps of the journey, from deciding which app and who was going to pay, locating the right car on arrival, to checking in with friends to let them know they’d arrived home safe. As we were coming up with these steps, I was throwing together arrows, speech/thought bubbles and little avatars of people, cars and phones to create the steps of our map. You can see the result below! This part of the workshop took about 20 minutes.

Our quick and dirty worked example of an experience map

After this, I asked each person to make a copy of the Miro board, and split each person into their own breakout room on Zoom so they could start working on their version of the GooseChase experience map. We did this for about 30-40 mins - during this time, I was rotating between the different breakout rooms, offering any tips or advice based on my own experience of drawing my first map. Thankfully, no one was really stuck and everyone brought their own perspective and lens to creating their individual experience maps.

I then brought everyone back together for the last 20-25 mins to start building our shared map. I copied everyone’s individual maps (including my own!) back into the shared Miro board, and asked each person to spend a few minutes talking through their own one, what they had done and the approach/mindset they had. It was really useful to see and hear each person’s thinking and have a chance to ask questions. One of the participants had written short labels to describe each stage of their experience map, which actually made the final part of the workshop very straightforward. We copied all the ‘stage’ labels from that person’s map into a list, and spent the remainder of the session as a group going through the other maps and labelling the stages. If we found a visual in someone’s map that couldn’t already be described by a label in our list, we would create a new label and add it to our list. This was the easiest way we found to identify all the unique stages across all our maps. We ended the session by dragging out all the labels from our list into a chronological journey, but ran out of time when it came to adding visuals to the map.

After the workshop

I did the first draft of adopting visuals from everyone’s individual maps into the shared experience map, filling in each of the stages that we’d identified with our labels. Once I’d done the first draft, the rest of the workshop participants made their own edits/amendments to settle on our v1. This took part asynchronously in the next couple of days after the workshop ended.

Finally, the ‘stage’ labels that we’d identified ended up serving another important purpose - when building out our Opportunity-Solution-Tree (the next piece of foundational work we did), those labels acted as the top-level opportunities in our tree. We just had to rewrite the labels to frame them as opportunities from a customer perspective.

Wrap up

I was really happy with what we achieved as a group in the 90 minutes we had - everyone had got a lot more comfortable with drawing out experience maps, worked through some examples and we’d built out the bones of our shared experience map. The output allowed us to quickly progress through creating the shared map and move on to the next parts of implementing our continuous discovery process.

I hope this post helps provide some actionable advice and suggestions to you and your own teams as you work towards becoming more effective product teams. Teresa herself is far more experienced and smarter than I am in these matters - you should definitely give her a follow if you haven’t already. You can also hit me up on Twitter with any questions / comments on this post, to chat product or just say hi!