You've got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology not the other way around.
This is what Steve Jobs is said to have told the entire company when he returned to Apple. In 1997, human-centered design and user experience were already existing concepts at the time. They had been just one of several approaches, but as this quote spread, user experience became an essential design (architectural) approach.
In truth, "experience" is a concept that is very tricky to define or talk about. The definition itself is highly ambiguous and broad, and it is not fixed in itself — it is heavily influenced by human emotion and aspiration as time goes on. That is why drawing a diagram of experience (mapping) is, above all, important.
When the entire organization designs the experience for an ecosystem, the need for models grows.
In particular, there are various methodologies based on human-centered design and user experience. The customer journey map and service blueprint, used in service design methodology, would be representative examples. The author defines, more broadly, this entire process of diagramming user experience as "mapping." This "mapping" can be seen as a snapshot that condenses a series of experiences, including 1) the process by which a user experiences a service and 2) the service at each step in that process, and 3) the organization that develops/operates the service at each step, along with the 'emotions, thoughts, and feelings' encountered in each part.
By visually aligning the various aspects of customer experience with business processes, it lets us best create and capture value across channels.
What we can gain from this kind of mapping is that it can finally bring all organizations, all project participants, and all product stakeholders into a state where they can have a conversation.
Mapping, precisely, provides the answer to the question, "When we kick off a project or set up and validate a product hypothesis, 'how do we begin'?"
All organizations, all project participants, all product stakeholders often don't share the same expectations. At such times, mapping can be used as a communication tool to clarify intent so that diverse stakeholders can put forward similar levels of satisfaction criteria.
One thing to consider in the mapping process is that you need to accept that you cannot control everything yourself. While trying to maintain consistency across the entire experience, you also need to understand that you cannot design every single touchpoint, the author says.
To add: there can be interactions over things you cannot control or have chosen not to control, and so awareness of the interdependencies between such actors and touchpoints is bound to influence strategic decisions.
