A company once brought me in because it needed more design help.
At least, that was the request.
The team was busy. The product had accumulated years of features. Different groups owned different parts of it. Everyone had work to do.
The problem appeared to be capacity.
It wasn’t.
When I started asking what the company wanted to change, nobody could give me a clear answer.
They knew where the business needed to go at a high level. They knew the product needed to improve. They could point to individual features, customer complaints and competitors doing better work.
But they couldn’t describe what the whole product should become.
That meant every team was solving its own version of the problem. One team improved a feature. Another changed a flow. Someone else updated the navigation. Each decision made sense on its own. Together, they didn’t create one coherent product.
The company didn’t need more design capacity.
It needed a shared destination.
Why isn’t a roadmap enough?
A roadmap organizes the journey: what happens first, what happens next, who owns each project and what it costs. It assumes everyone already agrees on the destination. When the strategy has turned into a list of initiatives and nobody can say what they add up to, the roadmap is organizing work without showing people where the work is going.
That works when everyone already understands the future they’re trying to create. But many companies don’t.
Leadership may understand the business strategy. They know they need to grow, defend their market, modernize the product or respond to AI. That strategy becomes a collection of initiatives:
- Improve onboarding.
- Add AI.
- Update navigation.
- Build a new dashboard.
- Increase retention.
- Simplify the product.
- Launch a new pricing model.
These might all be good ideas. But what do they add up to?
What should a customer experience six months from now? Which customer behaviours create value for the business? How should all the scattered capabilities fit together? What should feel consistent across the whole product?
If nobody can answer those questions, you don’t have a destination yet.
What should a customer experience when they open the product?
A customer should open the product and understand the next best action, complete the job that creates the most value for them, and leave. They shouldn’t need to remember where everything lives or relearn the product every time they return. People aren’t trying to use your product. They’re trying to get a job done.
Show them the next step. Help them get the value. Get out of their way.
That sounds simple. Building it across a large product is not.
Features accumulate in different places. Labels come from internal language. Teams develop their own interaction patterns. Similar actions work differently depending on which part of the product someone is using.
Customers end up learning the organization chart through the interface.
A better product has a shared logic. Similar jobs should follow similar flows. Labels should reflect what customers are trying to do. Navigation should organize the product around recognizable needs.
Learn one part of the product and you should understand the whole.
Why do good teams end up building a fragmented product?
Because each team only controls one part of the experience. A team can talk to customers, ship improvements and hit its goals while making the whole product more complicated: a new pattern here, a different solution to the same problem there, one more item in the navigation. Nobody is trying to fragment the product. Everyone is moving without the same map.
This is one of the harder problems to see inside a growing company.
A team introduces a new pattern because it works well for its feature. Another team solves a similar problem differently. A third adds something to the navigation because its project needs visibility. A fourth creates a workaround because changing the shared system would require too much coordination.
The result is often a one-step-forward, one-step-back cycle. Teams show work. Stakeholders realize it doesn’t fit with something happening elsewhere. The work gets revised. A new person enters the conversation. Priorities change. People redo decisions that should have been settled earlier.
It looks like an execution problem.
Often, it’s an alignment problem.
What is an experience vision?
An experience vision is a visual story showing what a product could become and how its major parts work together, usually a connected prototype with the story of how customer value creates business value. The output looks like design work. What it resolves are business decisions: which customers matter most, what to stop funding, and what should happen first.
It might include:
- The jobs the product should help customers complete.
- The next best actions it should make clear.
- A simpler way to organize scattered capabilities.
- A shared approach to navigation and labelling.
- Common patterns across important workflows.
- A prototype showing how the experience connects from beginning to end.
- A story explaining how customer value creates business value.
And the business questions it gives somewhere to live:
- Which customers matter most?
- Which behaviours drive growth?
- Where is complexity hurting retention or adoption?
- What should the company stop funding?
- Which opportunities deserve further investment?
- How should different product areas work together?
- What should happen first?
Instead of asking ten people to imagine the same abstract strategy, you give them something concrete to react to. They can point at it. Challenge it. Compare options. See the trade-offs. Agree on what matters.
| Roadmap | Experience vision | Team plans | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Answers | What happens first, who owns it, what it costs | Where the product is going and how its parts fit together | How each part gets built, tested and measured |
| Looks like | A sequence of initiatives | A connected prototype and the story behind it | Research, experiments, specs, builds |
| Decided by | Leadership, once the destination is clear | The people who own the customer, the product and the revenue, together | Each team, inside the direction the vision sets |
| Fails when | Nobody can say what the initiatives add up to | It turns into a giant specification | Every team is solving its own version of the problem |
Where should an experience vision start?
With the business, not with screens. How does the company make money? What drives growth? Where is revenue being lost? Which customer behaviours create value for both the customer and the company, and what is stopping them today? Designers need to understand the P&L, or they can simplify the product without knowing whether they’re simplifying the part that makes the business work.
Who needs to be in the room?
Three people, at minimum: someone who deeply understands the customer, someone who understands the product and its constraints, and someone in leadership who owns revenue or growth. Product and design shape the experience. The business sponsor connects it to a real commercial opportunity and can make the trade-offs required to move forward.
This cannot be delegated to a room full of people who need to take every decision somewhere else.
The people with authority need to be in the room.
How does the work unfold?
In five moves: collect what the organization already knows, turn it into several different directions, combine the strongest parts, build one higher-fidelity prototype, and tell the story of it end to end. The first concept doesn’t need to be the answer. The point is to make the opportunity visible so people can decide.
- Collect. Smart people inside the company have usually been thinking about these problems for months. The useful ideas are already circulating in meetings, documents and informal conversations; they’re just scattered. So you bring together the people who understand the customer and the business, and you write down what customers struggle with, where the current experience breaks down, how the company wants to grow, what might prevent that growth, which opportunities keep coming up, where teams disagree, and what the future product needs to make possible.
- Diverge. Develop several directions that solve the same problems differently. One may simplify the existing model. Another may reorganize the product around customer jobs. A third may suggest a more fundamental change to how the business delivers value.
- Combine. The point is not to generate three polished options so someone can vote on their favourite. Once people can see the choices, they can discuss what each one makes possible, take the strongest parts from different concepts, and combine them into a more complete direction.
- Prototype. That direction becomes a higher-fidelity prototype.
- Tell the story. What is the company doing for the customer? How does the customer know what to do next? How do the different capabilities fit together? How does the experience create value for the business?
For the first time, people can see the whole thing.
Does an experience vision replace the roadmap or the team’s own work?
No. An experience vision is a map, not a specification. It shows the destination and the major landmarks; teams still choose their routes, test alternatives, talk to customers and improve the original thinking. A good experience vision removes organizational ambiguity without removing team autonomy.
Each department still needs to decide:
- Which customers it should speak with.
- Which assumptions it needs to test.
- What it should measure.
- How its part should be built.
- What new information changes the plan.
The vision sets the direction. It doesn’t do the team’s work for them.
What is the real deliverable?
Alignment about the future of the business. There may be a prototype, a short deck and a video telling the customer story, and those matter because they let the vision travel beyond the people who were in the room. But the deliverable is that leadership can now decide what happens first, second and third.
Leadership should be able to use the vision to decide:
- What happens first, second and third.
- Which team owns each part.
- Where teams need to work together.
- Which initiatives no longer belong on the roadmap.
- How each project contributes to the larger experience.
- Why the sequence should create customer and business value.
Once the destination is visible, roadmap planning becomes much easier. You can finally organize the journey because everyone understands where they’re going.
Do you need one? A three-question test
Maybe not. If the business is growing, the roadmap is clear and your teams can describe the same future product, keep building. You don’t need another strategy exercise, and you probably don’t need another prototype either. If you’re not sure, ask three people three questions.
Ask your founder, your product leader and your design leader, separately:
- Where is the product going?
- What will the customer experience when we get there?
- How does the next year of projects fit together?
If you hear three different answers, you have an alignment problem.
That problem gets more expensive as the company grows, because every team turns its interpretation into real work. More capacity won’t fix it. More features won’t fix it. A longer roadmap won’t fix it.
Get the people who understand the customer, product and business into one room. Turn the strategy into something everyone can see. Then decide what happens first, second and third.
A roadmap organizes the journey. An experience vision helps everyone agree on where they’re going.
I help leadership teams create experience visions when the business needs to change but the future product is still difficult to see. If that sounds familiar, email me or start a project.