I recently went to Adaptive Path’s Managing Experiences conference and enjoyed it quite a bit. It focused primarily on people involved in leading multi-touchpoint customer experience work, not a group I rub shoulders with on a regular basis. MX was a nice balance of theory, case-studies, in-house/agency perspectives, and some random thoughtful bits. Bellow I compiled and paraphrased the soundbytes that stuck out to me into some raw notes…

• Successful teams and companies use “envisionment” to help articulate and establish vision (Spool). Envisionments on delicious.
• Teams often fail because they stop at envisionment and don’t follow through with actually shepherding the vision (Spool).
• A good vision is a stake in the ground on the horizon. No one can get there right now, but everyone can see it and ensure their work moves the team a (small) step closer (Spool)
• A good vision is specific to the experience. Its something that is yours. When looking at your vision could it be easily co-opted by someone else? Avoid generic articulations of vision. (Spool)
• Don’t go for a lofty enterprise wide vision. Focus on small butt critical pilot programs. (Spool)
• Less power points more envisionments (Craig Butler). Given the word on the street about Tufte and kittenz this is probably a good idea.
• Help articulate vision with philosophies (Merholz). Tenants, principles, mantras, not sure what to call them but I like them. Concise philosophies can be the jumping off point for bigger conversations or be reminders of those conversations for a team that is off in the details of a design. The Tivo example being Merholz favorite it seems.
• Based on his research, Spool says that the ability of everyone on a team to article vision is one of the three most important factors of success. While not the be all end all, lists of philosophies are a nice way to keep vision alive for the duration without having to flip through power points or read sleepy documents. For example, vetting design decisions against philosophies in addition to objectives.
• Experience strategy should ultimately provide clarity (Lara Lee). Seems obvious, but when I reflect on the countless 100 slide power points and mind numbing word docs created in the name of strategy, clarity seems under valued.
• Two kinds of experiences, adaptive evolving ecosystems aka youtube, and constrained fixed systems aka turbotax (Lara Lee). Both have there place, but the unpredictable and constantly evolving adaptive experiences have irresistible qualities. I would like to work on those please.
• Hiring out usability / observation is like hiring out your vacation. Its all about hours of exposure for designers (Spool). Hilarious way to put it, but painful to hear for those that are not able to always participate for whatever reason.
• Daniel Kahneman’s Peak-End Rule: The most memorable moment of an experience is either the best or the worst part of it. (Brandon Schauer).
• Successful teams are cross-functional (Spool). Not much more to say. He has done the research to back it up. Do everything you can to avoid the dirty waterfall hand off. It doesn’t mean adopting a prescriptive agile methodology, it means working together across disciplines from the beginning to the end (if there is one).
• Celebrating design failures is a key part of successful teams / organizations culture. “Risk averse companies produce crap.” (Spool)
• Management’s job should be about setting the organization up to recover from small failures. From the learnings of many small failures come the big successes. (Lane Becker)
• To avoid becoming a dinosaur hire and promote people who annoy you. (Neff Hudsun)
• Documentation is a record of failed collaboration. (Lane Becker)
• What is your organizations currency? (Margaret Gould Stewart). She talked about how after her shift at Google from Consumer products to YouTube she noticed a change in organizational currency. Search / consumer products favored the ability of designers to get their hands dirty with the developers while YouTube’s currency was more focused on quickly producing high quality design iterations. Whats your organizations currency?
• In fast moving organizations talking a lot about process is the best way to get yourself marginalized (Stewart).
• In organizations with complex evolving ecosystems (YouTube) situational awareness becomes the product strategy for fast moving cross disciplinary teams (Stewart). I love this one. It highlights the need for knowledge management and cross disciplinary collaboration tools.
• On style guides – Communicate boundaries so that people can knowingly break them (Stewart)
• Customer experience design requires balancing message vs functionality across all touch-points (Heidi Reinfeld). I like the idea of the focus on message or functionality shifting across different parts of a customer experience. Heidi showed great examples of how their Chipotle packaging, website, store and iPhone app designs pulled from the same brand promise / mission but brought the brand to life in very different ways. It reminded me of the Virgin America in flight safety video. The VA video is SO on brand but lacks any of the aesthetic attributes that sticks out so much in the functional parts of the customer experience.

My simple vision of the future? Planning departments hire people who are especially adept on the information superhighway, while training up whomever they feel is getting left behind. Don’t make digital strategy a specialty, make it cost-of-entry to all planners. After all, for all of its complexities, the digital world is just another platform that’s part of our world — not an alternate universe.

1. It imagines an idealized view of strategy as something pristine and not touching creative. This is not reality. Strategists come up with ideas too and it’s been my experience that people who don’t use the internet much don’t come up with great internet ideas.
2. To me it kind of suggests that no division of labor should happen within strategy, which I definitely disagree with. I think few would argue that there is a place for media strategists, since media buying and selling has its own ins and outs. That same could be said for brand strategy. It’s not that these things don’t work together or that your average strategist couldn’t hold their own playing these rolls, but it seems the industry has decided that they’re better off as specialists.