It’s Time to Move to Experience First

We’ve been through a bunch of “firsts” in our industry. Each one promising to be the answer we’ve been looking for. And honestly, each one has taught us something valuable, even if it wasn’t the complete solution we hoped it would be.

Where We’ve Been (And What We Learned)

There have been several ‘something-something-first’ approaches over the years. So, I won’t try to be exhaustive here but instead focus on the ones that stood out to me. Let me start with the Technology-First mindset, because that’s where countless teams started and the space where many still work in. Building whatever the databases, rules engines, and APIs would let us build. In this mindset, product design decisions are highly driven by what we can build and in what time, not so much based on what the user needs or how it really supports your business goals.

The problem? Most of the Technology-First solutions were experientially hollow. I remember working on projects where the team started with the database schema and work their way out to what the user would see. The result was often the same: users felt like they were navigating someone else’s technical architecture rather than accomplishing their own goals.

Another more recent approach was Mobile-First. This mindset started the design with a constraint: screen size. Here that tiny screen became the guide, imposing to prioritize and strip away everything that wasn’t essential from the start. It was a revelation for many teams: these limitations could actually make our designs better.

But here’s the thing: mobile-first was still fundamentally about accommodating technology. We were designing first for devices and screen sizes, not for people.

Then Design-First felt like the answer we’d been waiting for. The associated process – Design Thinking – gave us a process that put humans at the centre: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test. Finally, we were first asking “Who is this for?” before we asked, “How do we build it?”

And that was genuinely better. Much better.

But working with organizations in different industries, I kept noticing something missing. Design Thinking was excellent at solving product problems – and with AI driven design and research tools it’s even faster – but it often missed the holistic view of how product solutions fit together. We’d optimize individual touchpoints while the overall journey and experience remained fragmented.

A slight tangent: I know Service Design became that more common view on this holistic, connected experience. But what Service Design was lacking – and still is in my view – is a coherent process that reflects that. Most teams adopted Design Thinking as the stand-in process for Service Designs. So, a process that is arguably more product oriented doesn’t quite fit the mold of a Service experience that needs this connected, end-to-end experience thinking.

Why Experience First Makes Sense (Finally)

What about putting the Experience-First? The other mindsets all ultimately feed into the delivered experience. Wouldn’t Tech, Mobile, and Design first all work towards the intended experience?

I think that applying an Experience First mindset isn’t necessarily about rejecting everything that came before. It’s not an “either/or” situation – it’s a “yes, and” approach that can bring business thinking, design thinking, and technology considerations together in service of something bigger.

And the business model still matters. The technology capabilities are still foundational. We’d still consider feasibility, viability and desirability. And many other design process steps are still valuable. Experience-First doesn’t throw any of that away. It just provides the organizing principle that makes all these elements align better together.

When organizations tell me, “We need to be more user-focused” or “We need better technology” or “We need to improve our business metrics,” what they’re describing to me is disconnected thinking. These aren’t competing priorities – they’re interdependent elements that need to work together.

Experience-First asks a different question: “What complete experiential journey do we want our audience to have with us, and how do we align our business model, technology investments, and design processes to deliver that experience consistently?”

The Integration Nobody Talks About

Here’s where it gets interesting: taking an Experience-First approach forces integration across functions that have traditionally worked more in silos.

I’ve sat in countless meetings where the business strategist talks about customer acquisition costs, the technologist talks about system architecture, and the designer talks about user needs – and somehow these conversations happen like they’re talking about completely different products.

But your customer or user doesn’t want to experience silos. They don’t care that your engineering team made brilliant technical choices if the result is confusing to use. They don’t care that your design team created efficient workflows and beautiful screens if your business model makes the service unaffordable.

What they care about is whether their complete experience feels intentional and is valuable.

This means your business strategist needs to understand how pricing models affect user experience. Your technologist needs to appreciate how system performance impacts brand perception. Your product and service designers need to grasp how experience patterns influence business metrics.

It’s messier than sequential handoffs, but it’s also more powerful.

The Four Experience Quadrants (And Why They Need Each Other)

I’ve found it helpful to think about this in terms of four experience quadrants that need to work better together:

Brand experience isn’t only marketing related – it’s the big promise you make to your audiences and how consistently you deliver on it through every technological, content, and business experience point.

Content experience isn’t just editorial work or big data – it requires understanding business goals, technical constraints, and user needs simultaneously.

Product experience is where technical capabilities and business requirements meet user needs most directly. This is familiar territory for most teams.

Service experience is the orchestration piece – where business strategy becomes lived experience through designed experience points enabled by technology and content.

Now, most organizations excel in one, maybe two of these areas while the others suffer. They might have a strong brand but terrible product usability. Or excellent individual technical features that feel completely disconnected from each other.

The magic happens when all four work together, informed by solid business thinking and enabled by appropriate technology.

The Structural Reality

But let’s be honest about something: experiences don’t just float in space. Experiences need organizational support, and this is where a lot of Experience-First initiatives fail.

You need four structural elements aligned: People, Business Model, Processes, and Technology.

The People element means having teams that can collaborate across functions. You need business strategists who understand that the customer lifetime value depends on the experience quality. You need technologists who see their role as enabling great experiences, not just building functional systems.

The Business Model element is often the killer. If your economic engine rewards short-term transactions over long-term relationships, you’ll struggle to invest appropriately in experience quality. For non-profit or public service teams: you’ll be rewarded for meeting your mandates. This will manifest in future budgets and fund-raising milestones that count on the best, intentionally, designed experiences now.

The Process element trips up more teams than you’d expect. If your product development process is still siloed by function, creating connected experiences becomes nearly impossible. Effectively syncing marketing processes with product research and design approaches plus product support after launch is another weakness in many environments.

The Technology element is the foundation everything else sits on. Legacy systems that can’t talk to each other make seamless experiences a pipe dream. On the flipside, chasing innovative technologies without fulfilling a solid user / customer need is equally going to fail.

The Journey from Customer to User to Client

On top of the structural conversation, I see few teams effectively organise themselves around this phenomenon: your audience fundamentally changes as they move through their relationship with you.

Customers are in evaluation mode – they’re trying to understand value and make decisions. From a business perspective, this is about positioning and pricing, but it’s also about the experience of discovery, and decision-making.

Users are primarily in task-completion mode – they need to get stuff done. This is about operational efficiency and product-market fit, but it’s also about the experience of onboarding and long term use.

Clients are in relationship mode – they’ve decided you’re worth sticking with. This is about customer lifetime value, loyalty and advocacy, and it’s also about the experience of an ongoing partnership and ensuring that clients aren’t treated as first time customers at each experience point.

Each stage requires different business investments, different technical capabilities, and different experience design approaches. Most organizations optimize for one stage (usually customer acquisition) while the others suffer.

Making This Real

So how do you do this? Here’s what I’ve seen work:

Stop having business strategy, technology planning, and design happen in sequence. Bring these perspectives together from day one. It feels messier at first, but it prevents the expensive rework later on that happens when these groups work in isolation.

Start measuring success of experience journeys, not just individual touchpoints. This usually reveals disconnects in the journey that nobody realized existed.

Accept that this requires new collaborative practices in your organizational culture. The old model of “strategy first, then design, then build” doesn’t work for truly connected experiences.

The Competitive Reality

Here’s the business case that usually gets leadership attention: in a world where (technology) products are increasingly commoditized, the experience becomes the primary differentiator.

Your competitors can copy your features. They can match your pricing. They can even hire your people. But they can’t easily replicate the organizational capability to consistently deliver remarkable, connected experiences.

This capability becomes sustainable competitive advantage because it requires integration across business, design, and technology in ways that are genuinely hard to replicate.

Where We Go from Here

I’m not going to pretend this is simple. Most organizations are structured in ways that make cross-functional collaboration more challenging. Most incentive systems reward departmental metrics rather than holistic experience journey outcomes.

But the organizations that figure this out are going to have a significant advantage. Your audience increasingly expects experiences that feel intentionally designed and seamlessly connected. Meeting this expectation requires the kind of integrated thinking that Experience-First demands.

The question isn’t whether this shift is coming it’s already here. The question is whether your organization can evolve its collaborative practices fast enough to take advantage of it.

I believe every organization can benefit from an Experience-First mindset and the Experience Thinking process, but it requires acknowledging that business success, design excellence, and technical capability aren’t competing priorities; they’re interdependent elements that need to work together.

And when teams successfully make this shift, they stop treating experiences as something that happens after the “real” business and “foundational” technical decisions are made. Instead, they recognize that the experience IS the business strategy, enabled by technology and brought to life through design.

That’s what Experience-First really means. And honestly? It’s about time.

Let me know your thoughts and how this approach lands in your next project!