Customer-facing products often reach a point where, on the surface, there is a lot of work delivered, but in reality, with little customer value in return. While a combination of factors could contribute to this, one of the key and somewhat not obvious ones is losing sight of customers. As your development, architecture, and technology choices drift away from enabling core customer use cases, their needs, and optimum performance to deliver the access patterns, the value/effort ratio will continue to drop. You can avoid this by building a technical foundation tightly connected to the customers and ensuring the linkage always exists. 

 Below, we will walk you through building a customer-centric technical foundation and having the proper mechanism to ensure development stays relevant and continues to contribute to the customer's value at all times. 

Start with the user journeys

User journeys are the foundation and source of truth, the linchpin of the foundation. Create a comprehensive list of critical journeys. Think about goals and tasks to complete a workflow with a clear outcome.  Fundamental principles to building CUJs(Critical User Journeys):

• Involve all functions UX, PM, engineer, etc

• Research, brainstorm, and iterate until there is reasonable coverage

• Leave out features and solutions, leave open for innovation

• Focus on the deeper needs of users

• Define “why” that is useful and “how” that is usable to the users

• Refresh CUJs regularly or on demand if you see business disruptors

Define experience metrics

Starting with the CUjs, identify critical metrics focused on the user’s experience while using the product or service, such as total completion time and success rate. UX analytics with these metrics and UX survey results will provide actionable signals directly usable in developing and guiding investment areas. 

Define business metrics

These are revenue-related, business-critical metrics, for example, the number of active users, sign-ups, and trials. The negative trends in the metrics by different dimensions are indicators to look deeper into specific areas, correlate to experience metrics if needed research, and update CUJs. 

Create a north-star 

Define a product vision of the ideal experience and flow for CUJs from what is known today. This north star will guide the teams to define artifacts without straying from the customer goals. Revisit the north star as needed and update if there is a need for a significant change in CUJs. Use this as a blueprint for the rest of the development work. 

Integrate into the development

The last but not least important step is to link what we have defined with CUJs to SDLC. 

• Instrument and generate experience metrics, build analytics pipeline that will help drive product, development, project decisions #data-driven

• Place mechanisms to detect and prevent any regressions in these metrics as early as possible in the developmental cycle, leverage static analysis tools, performance tests, A/B testing, security scans #left-shift

• Use and connect CUJs to every strategy and planning document, roadmap, OKRs, sprint 

• Use and connect CUJs for every part of the SDLC, from PRDs to design to testing 

• Create design guidelines to ensure components and services are positively contributing to CUJs and the metrics #customer-centric-design

• Invest early in #automation for any large repeated cost developmental tasks, and monitor and maintain high productivity metrics 

• #work-backward Build systems and components, make the right trade-offs to optimize the delivery of CUJs, think about access patterns, and design systems that can adapt to the changes