Building a strategic roadmap

What we built

Reflections

Strategy: Shaping the Future UX Vision of a Leading Automotive Brand

May 2022 - July 2023 / 8 min read

Overview

What happens when a company releases feature after feature without a unifying thread? Design ennui. While users appreciate minor enhancements, they continue to remain disconnected with the absence of cohesion in the overall experience, ultimately unable to develop a meaningful relationship with the brand.

This case study is a recollection of my experience working within a team to address this stagnation, along with the related processes, outcomes, and challenges

Activities

Service Design, Research Synthesis, UX Concepts, Journey Mapping, Stakeholder Management

Organization

Unfortunately, in adherence to a non-disclosure agreement, certain screens have been omitted and any details that could disclose the client's identity have been censored or redacted. The primary objective of this document is to underscore the skills, methodologies, and insights attained throughout the project.

Context

For over a year, I served as a UX/UI Designer at Futurice, a digital consultancy rooted across Europe. Their portfolio boasts an impressive array of clients, including a multi-brand automotive company.

Immediately after being onboarded, I immersed myself in understanding the client's service offerings and design ecosystem. Out of several available projects, I chose to be part of the “Vision” team — a group dedicated to redefining the lens through which user experiences were shaped. Despite the abstract and challenging nature of the topic, I was drawn to the opportunity to think big and contribute to impactful, long-term solutions.

To tackle this ambitious goal, we deployed a team of four UX designers and two service designers from our side.

Proposal: A strategic shift

We advocated for a shift toward a more strategic mindset — one that emphasized not just delivering solutions, but identifying and addressing deeper problems and gaps within the user journey. Our goal was to show how this approach would enable teams to explore and validate ideas before implementation, creating a stronger alignment among stakeholders and encouraging better collaboration across organizational units, to drive both innovation and long-term success.

Problem: A feature-driven approach

Historically, design process had been mainly feature-driven, with incremental roadmaps stretching years into the future. While this approach kept the focus on the next thing to build, it created significant empathy gaps between the product and its users. The myopic focus on short-term features overlooked the broader question of what would deliver the most long-term value for both customers and the business.

Research = Prologue

We studied existing market research analyses, insights from customer advisory boards, diary studies and findings from user testing sessions. This enabled a deeper exploration of activities that warranted further investigation.

We created behavioral archetypes to better understand the diverse needs, expectations and profiles of our users.

Finding the right problem to solve

We determined that the mobile app supported six key experiences:

Advanced remote control
Navigation and Journey management
Community and Engagement
Aftersales
Sustainability
Charging and e-mobility

We began by mapping out customer journeys for each of these, taking into account upcoming features while identifying pain points and opportunities for improvement. This mapping process spanned multiple touchpoints — the phone, car, charging stations, and dealerships. Understanding that a breakdown in any of these areas could jeopardize customer engagement was crucial in shaping our strategy and connecting all aspects of the experience with a single thread.

From the identified pain points, we crafted actionable “How might we…?” questions and consolidated them into vision statements, ultimately prioritizing the most significant ones and designating them as “Hero Moments.”

Each Hero Moment served as a prompt for deeper exploration, presented in a narrative format complete with its own mini-story. This approach was helpful in communicating our concepts to a diverse group of stakeholders, enabling clarity and engagement while emphasizing the holistic nature of our strategic thinking.

Advanced Remote Control

To simplify the scope of this case study, I will limit this section to only expanding on one key experience.

The primary goal of Advanced Remote Control was to cultivate a sophisticated and interconnected experience ecosystem. This would establish a seamless and evolving synergy between the phone and the car, intelligently leveraging user behavior insights to provide timely and contextual suggestions that elevate the overall experience.

With roadmaps in place for upcoming features, we prioritized Hero Moments that aligned with these plans. This ensured harmony between our immediate goals and the overarching product vision, facilitating focused development, design ideation, alignment with strategic objectives, and synchronization with product owners.

The Hero moments we prioritized were:

An unforgettable test drive - How can we expand the test drive experience with the help of the app?
Being on top of things - How can we better inform users about the states and the active processes in the car in different context?
A powerful controller in your hands - How might we make it easier to set up driving settings of a new car? How can we configure driving settings remotely?
Co-driver: Bring Your Own Device Onboard - How can passengers use their phone to adjust controls inside the car?
Park without interruptions - How can we create a continuous and seamless parking experience?

Test Drive

Results

In a series of dedicated sessions, we presented our strategic vision and key challenges for the future roadmap to the Product Owners (POs). These discussions allowed us to align our initiative with the identified priorities, effectively reorienting the development of features toward the desired outcomes.

In the end, several Hero Moments and their corresponding topics secured funding and approval, marking a collective achievement

Our initiatives encountered resistance on multiple occasions, often seen as experimental rather than practical when compared to the existing, tangible processes that prioritized feature delivery. A significant challenge arose from one of the UX leads, whose exacting and often unclear expectations, along with a stringent management style, negatively affected team morale and productivity. This issue was compounded by an unexpected extended burnout leave from them, which further slowed the project’s progress and ultimately led me to transition to a different topic.

Although this case study deviates from a conventional structure, it was exciting to collaborate on an initiative designed to shape the future of a Fortune 500 brand’s user experience. Throughout the project, I gained valuable insights into service design as a discipline and deepened my understanding of the intricate relationship between UX and service design.

In hindsight, I recognize the importance of effective and compassionate leadership in project success — it can profoundly impact team dynamics, project outcomes, and overall work quality. As Adam Grant aptly said, "The best leaders are neither cheerleaders, nor critics: they’re coaches."