Digital Experience Design

You own part of the experience. Your customer experiences the whole.

A customer problem reaches your backlog. Your team understands it. Perhaps an experiment has already shown a promising improvement. But making that improvement last depends on another team's priorities, a platform migration or a decision you cannot make alone.

What do you do next?

Digital Experience Design is for Product Owners and Leads who own part of the experience and depend on others to improve the whole.

Drawing on first-hand cases from e-commerce and public services, Tim Thijsse explores the Decision Gap: the distance between understanding a customer problem and securing a decision someone can carry out. The cases include improvements that reached implementation, proposals that stalled and trade-offs that deliberately favoured other goals.

Throughout the book, See, Connect, Improve provides a practical thread:

• SEE: Understand the person's goal, context and experience. Bring research, behaviour, feedback and data together, and identify what remains uncertain.

• CONNECT: Find the people, priorities and dependencies that shape the response. Clarify who can decide and what each team can contribute.

• IMPROVE: Design and test a response, secure an executable commitment and review what changes for the customer.

You will learn how to:

• Look beyond your product boundary to the expectations, information and responsibilities carried across the customer journey.

• Decide whether a finding needs further research, an experiment or a delivery commitment.

• Bring customer evidence into prioritisation and make competing goals explicit.

• Record decisions, ownership and review triggers so valuable insights remain actionable after a presentation, sprint or migration.

• Apply the same thinking to AI and automation, including when human judgement and intervention are needed.

Eight design principles, practical case discussions and short Put it to work sections help you bring these ideas into your next refinement, planning meeting or cross-team conversation.

Start with the part you can influence. Connect it to the people who can help improve the whole.