Your Guide To Practical Experience Blueprinting

Your Guide to
Blueprinting by Erik Flowers &

The Practical Way Megan Erin Miller
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YOUR GUIDE TO BLUEPRINTING THE PRACTICAL WAY
by Erik Flowers and Megan Erin Miller
First Edition © 2022 by Practical by Design. All rights reserved.
Cover design and interior artwork by Megan Erin Miller
www.practicalbydesign.co
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ISBN 9798844640353
Praise for Practical by Design
Blueprinting helped me unpack and showcase an existing process Amazing, simply amazing! From just a short course I was able to
and allow people to visualize the troubles of our users. It helped the deep dive into processes within my organization and fully understand
business side create a new process. the problems throughout the journey, identifying tactical and
strategic changes for improvement.
—Principal Manager, Business Transformation, Government
—Digital Transformation Manager, Gov. Services
Practical Blueprinting gave me the right language to get the buy-in
from leadership and stakeholders. The template was easy and I am new to service design, and the course was very fluid and
allowed us to externalize things that were boxed up institutional simple to understand. I was able to apply the method with an auto
knowledge and collectively raise the business acumen for everyone. manufacturer in a 3-day workshop. The plan and ideation that came
That was priceless. The blueprint became a conversation piece out of the effort were phenomenal and appreciated and owned by
driving healthy conversations and conflicts that elevated the quality the CEO.
of collaboration. —Principal Consultant, Consulting
—Innovation Strategist, Consulting
As a lawyer, blueprinting helps me provide better services to my
It’s easy to talk about customer journeys. It is difficult to map them. clients, and helps me think about how I create my own services in a
But using Practical Blueprinting makes it easier. frictionless manner.
—Chief Service Officer, Information Technology Consulting —Partner, Law Firm
We transformed our entire global talent-acquisition organization I loved everything about the Practical Blueprinting course. It was well
strategy using service design that started with a blueprinting session! designed, and takes the method of the blueprint and strips away all
the formalities to identify issues fast. The heat map effect allows for
—UX Researcher, Technology and Manufacturing
quick identification of what needs the most attention.
Blueprinting has helped us create rituals to eliminate silos and —Event Designer, Self Employed
guarantee that our efforts are client-centered.
I really enjoyed this course. It’s not very often that you can get this
—Head of Design, Corp. Development and Digital Transformation
in-depth look at how to use a methodology and to see it in action.
The Practical Blueprint helped me enormously to design better —Course Taker

interactions with clients of our commercial programs. Thanks to it, we
improve satisfaction by more than 150%. Each section was easy and quick to digest, and I appreciate all the
tools that you also include in the process of learning!
—Head of Sales Excellence, Global Marketing Firm
—Course Taker
Practical Blueprinting provided me with a framework which I could
use to engage my colleagues and add the right amount of friction to This is a super accessible course. You did a great job of explaining
each step by forcing us to consider all the requirements to deliver it. simple ways to address complex problems. And using legos for the
mock sessions is genius. All around, very fun and educational!
—Co-Founder & Service Designer, Healthcare Services
—Course Taker
Ultimately, blueprinting guided alignment within the department and
what new resources were missing for new hires during onboarding. Loved it!! I thought it was the most practical course I’ve taken. I liked
how you walked through the blueprinting process step by step. I feel
—Service Designer, Travel Rewards company
like I can run a blueprinting process next week!
It brought teams together, broke down silos, and brought out —Course Taker
empathy. It made people realize that there were many things that
they did not know, and gave a focus on what to act on. The tone, style, and content in the course was really engaging.
The process is a big improvement on how we were doing things,
—Service Designer & Research Manager, Global B2B
particularly because you took it all the way through making the
results actionable. Thanks for that!
—Course Taker
Contents
Introduction to Blueprinting 11
What is an experience blueprint? 12
The value of blueprinting 14
The lens of the experience 15
When to blueprint 16
What you can blueprint 17
Frontstage and backstage 18
How blueprinting is unique compared to other methods 20
Blueprinting vs. Journey Mapping 21
Current-state vs. future-state blueprinting 27

Current-state blueprinting: why, when, and how to prepare 29
Future-state blueprinting: why, when, and how to prepare 32
Going from current-state to future-state with blueprinting 36
The format of a blueprint 39

Scenarios to blueprint 40
Phases and the experience lifecycle 45
Steps of the scenario 50
Layers of the blueprint 58
Example Blueprints 63
The process of blueprinting 71

High level blueprinting process 72
Planning and preparation 79

Selecting your scenarios 81
Identifying who to invite 81
Preparing scenarios for blueprinting 84
How much time will you need 85
Roles for running an effective session 87
Remote, hybrid, and in-person workshop strategies 88
Tools for blueprinting 90
Facilitating Blueprinting 95
Facilitation steps 96
Top-to-Bottom or Left-to-Right? 98
Taking action after blueprinting 103

What to do after current-state blueprinting 104
Current-state blueprinting synthesis process 106
Current-state blueprinting outputs and what to do with them 108
What to do after future-state blueprinting 110
Going from workshop to work 112
Common blueprinting questions 115

Is blueprinting just applied service design? 116
Why “Practical” Blueprinting (vs. traditional service blueprinting)? 116
Why did you rename the service blueprint? 117
How many scenarios do I really need? 118
Can I use the blueprint if I am a UX or product designer? 119
Can I use the blueprint if I am (insert your role here)? 120
Making a blueprint a living document 121
Are there other ways to modify the blueprint format? 122
Is a blueprint a pretty map I can show to stakeholders? 124
How do I get my organization to let me blueprint? 125
Conclusion 127
Glossary 131
Key terms 131
Methods 133
Introduction
When we published our original Guide to Practical Service Blueprinting
in November 2015, we were blown away by the response and have since
been amazed at the continued use of the guide as an introduction to
service design and one of its core methodologies.
Since then, we’ve continued to grow and evolve the method in real work
settings, publish canonical blog posts on the topic, and teach thousands of
people around the world how to use blueprinting through workshops and
our first online course, which launched in 2017.
This new and significantly expanded guide to blueprinting contains

updated content, taking you deeper into the method, and covers both
current and future state blueprinting.
We are so excited to share our knowledge and experience with you, and
hope that you find it transformative for your work, your organizations, and
your customers.
Happy blueprinting!
— Megan & Erik

More than a book.
More than a method.
A practical practice.
We started this business in 2015 with the inten-
tion of making the process of service blueprinting
easier to learn and easier to take action from after
running into challenges and a lack of available resources that went beyond
the academic. This was the origin of Practical by Design.
We focus on practical methods that make it easier to do design, innovation,

and strategy. Through Practical by Design, we are promoting a new prac-
tical way of working, developed on the job from real-world challenges with
the aim of transforming our work, our careers, our organizations, and our
customer’s success.
This is the first of what we plan as a series of books that break down
actionable methods, frameworks, and mindsets. At the core of everything
we teach is the principle of applicability: if it’s not actionable, it’s not
practical.
More help is available!

We understand that sometimes a book isn’t enough,
no matter how much the authors put into it. We know
this because we’re just like you, practictioners looking
to grow their skills and learn from others.
This is why we created our online learning project,

starting with the “Introduction to Practical Service
Blueprinting” course (renamed as “Introduction to Current State
Blueprinting”).
Sometimes, you simply want to hear a voice, follow along with a lesson,
and do more than just read. You want to expand your capabilities and
level-up. Check out our availabe—and coming soon—courses that this
book complements.
Companion Courses
Available now: Current-State Experience Blueprinting
Map out key scenarios. Solve end-to-end problems. Facilitate and synthesize
your first current state blueprinting session!
You will learn what it takes to organize and run a current-state service blue-
printing workshop, synthesize the output and generate actionable work for
your organization, and grow your service design skills as a trained service
blueprinting facilitator!
• What a current state blueprint is • How to plan out your service

and what it’s good for! blueprinting project
• Each step of the blueprinting • How to facilitate and synthesize a
process, from planning to taking blueprinting session
action • What to do with the output of your
• How to identify your opportunity blueprint and how to take action
spaces, scenarios, and touchpoints • Conducting your working sessions
• What makes up the front stage and and workshops digitally or in-
backstage components person
Coming soon: Future-State Experience Blueprinting

Map your vision into reality. Turn your design into an actionable implemen-
tation plan. Learn how to facilitate a future state blueprinting process!
You will learn what it takes to organize and run a future state blueprinting
process, facilitate a blueprinting session virtually, synthesize the output
and generate actionable work for your organization to implement the new
design, and grow your skills as a trained blueprinting facilitator!
Due out Late 2022, early 2023! It’s a big one!
Discount code For 20% off courses and

Use discount code: BPDIGITAL to get 20% off templates use code:
BPDIGITAL
template kits and courses!
Visit pbd.pub/courses
Chapter One
Introduction to
Blueprinting
We live in an increasingly complex world. Organizations face existen-
tial challenges and are navigating change at an unprecedented pace.
Workplaces have been turned on their heads with increased remote work,
remote customers, permeability between services and products, and
ever-increasing expectations from both employees and customers in what
organizations offer and the values that they adhere to. This dramatic trans-
formation happening worldwide has changed the way shoppers shop,
customers buy, visitors visit, and how designers design! It’s not just the
nature of work that has evolved, the nature of our customers has too.
We need new tools to become more nimble and embed human-centric

values deeper into how we work. While there are many ways to invest time
and resources into customer experience, human-centered design, and
employee experience, one method stands above the rest as a fantastic
way to improve our services, products, and businesses with the experience
in mind, and that tool is Practical Experience Blueprinting.
11
What is an experience
blueprint?
Experience Blueprinting (known also as service blueprinting) is a way to
look at how the business is delivering an experience. It allows organi-
zations to look through the lens of the experience to understand the
“behind the scenes” of the business—the underlying people, policies,
processes, systems, and touchpoints that create the resulting experi-
ence. This “end-to-end” and “surface-to-core” view of how the experience
is delivered is essential to both improving current-state experiences and
designing new ones.
What’s unique to blueprinting as a methodology (vs. process mapping or

journey mapping for example) is that it looks both at the experience and
the delivery together, and through it we aim to stay customer-centric in
how we understand, assess, design, and plan the backstage operations of
the business.
The intent is to stay customer-centric, but paradoxically, the blueprint

focuses on mapping almost everything but the customer experience.
To understand this, think about how your organization is a system that
produces services and offerings for your customers. In order to improve
12 Your Guide to Blueprinting the Practical Way

their experience, you have to delve into all the dimen- A blueprint is a map of
sions of the business system, and this is what the how your organization
experience blueprint does best—it connects the
delivers the experience
dots between the experience, and looks through it
as a lens into the business. By using the blueprinting
of a service or
format, you are baking in customer centricity in how product offering.
you organize and run your business.
Blueprinting is a tool that—unlike process mapping, journey mapping,

etc.—lets you see how your organization functions as a holistic system.
The product or service offerings your customers encounter can only be as
good as the systems that produce them.
Imagine that your customers’ experiences are like a patient complaining

to a doctor about how their elbow hurts every time they play tennis. The
customer’s words spoken aloud to the doctor of how and where the elbow
hurts are like the customer journey. An x-ray and MRI of the elbow is the
blueprint. Both are valid, but they are different ways of
understanding the pain.
Blueprinting is
And much like the difference between a detailed customer centric
story of how your elbow hurts when your tennis business systems
racket whacks that ball across the net vs. an x-ray
mapping.
of your elbow, the former tells a vivid story and is
cheap to produce. The latter has much more detail
and validity as a diagnostic tool, but costs a lot more (especially if you are
buying your first x-ray machine!).
What you get from experience blueprinting
• Current State Blueprinting for improving existing experiences: actionable

improvement opportunities for both the frontstage customer experience and
the backstage operations
• Future State Blueprinting for newly envisioned experiences: an actionable

implementation plan for how to build the operational foundation needed to
deliver new experiences
Simply speaking, blueprinting is a detailed visual mapping method. It is
done in a group setting to create a visual representation of the various
aspects of business operations that are the foundation for delivering an
experience. While this method does result in a “physical” blueprint, the true
value of the method is in the conversation that this facilitates across stake-
holders, and the actionable insights that the process results in.
The value of blueprinting

Blueprinting helps you see how customers experience what your business
delivers. This perspective enables you to effectively change the way your
organization delivers your service or offering for the better. Because of this,
blueprinting supports the improvement of internal operations just as much
as it supports the improvement of customer experiences.
We believe blueprinting is one of the best ways to inspire your organiza-

tion to act in a new way, to approach problems differently, and to deliver
experiences better than ever before. It is through shared understanding
and a holistic perspective that teams gain the meaningful insights needed
to transform customer and employee experiences. We believe that the
internal processes and systems of your organiza-
tion are what produce—and paradoxically, constrain
A blueprint is not just
the success of—the touchpoints and interactions
an artifact; it is a means of the customer experience. The experience your
to drive change. customers have and the systems that produce what
they interact with are inextricably linked. You cannot
affect one without affecting the other.
Blueprinting is especially effective when you are dealing with “wicked”

problems that are particularly hard to diagnose and need a holistic
approach to uncover the root cause of the problem. It is the perfect
method for approaching experiences that are cross-channel, involve
multiple touchpoints, and are the result of a cross-functional effort
composed of many teams and stakeholders behind the scenes. And let’s
be honest. This is more and more of the reality of all our services, products,
and offerings! Because of this, blueprinting works great for ecosystem-level
scenarios that span across a web of offerings.

The blueprint maps systems and scenarios, looking through a chosen
“experience” lens, yet these business systems result in many potential
experiences. This is one of the huge benefits of the blueprinting format, as
it allows you to uncover the underlying business systems that need to be
improved and optimized to enable a better ecosystem of experiences. This
is a practical application of systems thinking to fix scenarios that result in
better customer experiences.
The lens of the experience

One of the true values of this method is its flexibility to look through the
lens of the experience (for whoever this is defined) in order to “unpack”
what is underneath.
The experience viewed through this lens could be thought of as a tradi-

tional “customer’s experience” in a busi-
ness-to-customer relationship. However,
A blueprint looks through
blueprinting can be used to pick any role
as the primary lens through which to view
the lens of the experience
the business. To this end, blueprinting can at how the business is
help you to improve employee experiences, delivering that experience.
or address many internal issues where
teams within an organization are providing
“services” or support to other roles and teams. Depending on what
problem you want to solve, you get to pick the primary “experience lens”
through which to blueprint the business operations.
As noted above, you can’t fix painful and broken customer experiences (or
create delightful net-new experiences) by solely focusing on the customer
experience itself. You have to look deeply at what is producing it.
Like an amusement park, what the riders of the roller coaster see is the
thrill of their ride, but the customer doesn’t see or think about the gears
and guts of the mechanics that pull the cars up the track the, or the physics
and mathematics behind the g-forces, the curvature of the tracks, or the
acceleration—all tested to reduce motion sickness and optimize thrill
months or years in advance. If a rider gets sick during the biggest g-force
curves, you could focus on treating their symptoms proactively by offering
motion sickness medications when they enter the park, OR you could do a
deep-dive into the track and figure out which curve is causing the sickness
and how to modify the track to address it.
When to blueprint
Blueprinting is what we consider a “keystone” method, meaning, a method
used at critical junctions in your organization to help create alignment
on design, strategy, and implementation. If we imagine a continuous cycle
of discovery, strategy, design, implementation, and assessment, blue-
printing fits in two primary places: during discovery as a way to better
understand and evaluate current-state, and during design as a way to
envision how the organization might deliver a new experience.
Current State Blueprinting

helps you better understand
how the experience is delivered
Discovery
Measure Strategy
Future State Blueprinting

Implement Design helps you transition from
Design to Implement

Whether you are in a service designer, product manager, or other busi-
ness role, you might consider how your organization could adopt using this
method as a standard way of understanding, aligning, and designing
experience delivery. In the next chapter, we will talk through use cases for
when current-state and future-state blueprinting are the right tools.
What you can blueprint

Blueprinting is an extremely flexible tool and can be applied to a wide
range of experiences (or scenarios)—really anything that can be looked at
end-to-end as a story over time that has resulted from a system.
Different kinds of experiences you can blueprint
• The experience a customer has with services, products, and other offerings
• Employee experiences and other internal support within an organization
• “Mandatory” experiences—like government, compliance driven processes
• Events, conferences, workshops, trainings or other live programs
• You can even apply blueprinting to your personal life! (think: travel, birthday
parties—what processes, systems, actors need to be in place?)
Let’s take this a little further. Really, what we are talking about is a linear
scenario through time with a main “subject” that is “experiencing” or going
through this scenario. The many factors and systems components that
result in that particular set of linear steps of the scenario are what we blue-
print. Thinking from this angle, you could even blueprint how a tadpole
becomes a frog, or something even where no living thing is at the center
of the story—like how a star goes supernova or how ancient organic matter
turns into crude oil. What matters is there are systems (and interactions
of multiple discrete subsystems) that make up the larger, interconnected
components that deliver the experience.
It’s no coincidence that most companies now refer to what their customers
experience as an “ecosystem.” That’s not borrowed from psychology,
that’s biology, ecology.
Really, you can blueprint anything that results in a linear scenario or story
through time, and with this, any experience can be blueprinted (with the
right team assembled) to understand how it is delivered—what processes,
tools, technology, touchpoints, and policies created the “stage” for the
experience to happen.
The primary use for blueprinting that we are focusing on is in an organiza-

tional context, to improve the experience we are creating for customers,
employers, colleagues, or other impacted audiences.
For the sake of simplicity, we will primarily use “customer” to refer to the
role that is experiencing the service, support, product, or other business
offering which we are blueprinting.
Frontstage and backstage

In order to understand blueprinting as a method, we need to distinguish
the frontstage from the backstage.
Blueprinting focuses on looking through the frontstage as a viewport into

the “invisible” details of the backstage. In this way, blueprinting connects
the dots between an experience and the delivery.
The frontstage is used to describe everything that the customer experiences

when interacting with the business—it is the visible part of the business to the
customer.
The backstage refers to everything happening behind the scenes in the orga-
nization that results in laying the foundation for the customer experience.
The literal metaphor is helpful here. If you imagine a simple stage in a

theater, the frontstage is where the action happens and what the audience
can see. The backstage is where all props, lights, sets, and the crew are
doing the work, all of which should be invisible to the audience.
Additionally, just as the customer has a “outside of the theater” life—a

context, environment, culture, and background—an organization has a
similar “behind the scenes” in which culture, beliefs, values, environment,

budget constraints, and other limitations impact the backstage operational
experience delivery.
These stages and their respective “behind the scenes” set the stage
for the organization to deliver a product or service offering, and for the
customer to have their experience.
How blueprinting is unique
compared to other methods
While Blueprinting does a fantastic job of connecting the dots between
the frontstage and the backstage, it is not the primary tool you might use
to deeply understand and explore the frontstage experience. For this,
user research and journey mapping are better suited. Conversely, there
are many additional methods and approaches to improving or designing
the backstage of business operations (for example, process mapping).
Blueprinting does not replace these methods, instead, it is complementary
and often a missing puzzle piece in connecting the two.
By connecting blueprinting into your existing orga-

You can think of the nizational toolkit, you will find it enables actionable
blueprint as being a bridge work for improving both the frontstage and back-
between the frontstage stage. For example, as an input to blueprinting,

doing customer research and creating current-state
and the backstage. journey maps are a great way to get ready to blue-
print and will make your blueprint more accurate as
a representation of customer experience. Similarly, understanding organi-
zational processes through process mapping can give you a more accu-
rate picture of how your organization is handling its operations, and this will
benefit your group’s understanding of the backstage. The experience blue-
print connects the dots between what is happening to the customer and
what is going on behind the scenes.
Similarly, as an output of blueprinting, you will want to leverage other

design methodologies to design and create a newly improved customer
experience based on findings from the blueprinting session (e.g. story-
boarding, mapping, wireframes, prototypes), and you will have many new
operational backstage changes to implement as well, which may warrant
creating future-state process maps or other changes to roles and responsi-
bilities, technology systems, policies, and more.
The blueprint is the visualization of your scenario or system’s spinal

column. It houses the delicate spinal cord and is the central conduit that
everything else passes through. When you can see and understand this
foundational spine to your scenarios and systems, then the work can begin

where you apply personas, journey maps, process maps, wireframes, etc.,
to the periphery. But, we believe that the practical blueprint is the best way
to map the spine of any system, and can be used across any boundary,
industry, or scenario. And just like working with an actual spine (ouch!), you
need the right instruments and visualizations. We don’t know about you,
but before that surgeon heads in with their scalpel, we’d want them to have
a very good look at those x-rays and MRIs! This is the view that practical
experience blueprinting gets you.
Blueprinting vs. Journey

Mapping
As this is one of the most common questions people have when learning
about blueprinting, we want to spend a little time addressing the difference
between a journey map and an experience blueprint. Rest assured—these
two formats are allies, not redundant. Like adding x-rays to your medical
practice at the turn of the 20th century, new methods require a little more
elaboration and training to know when and when not to use them.
Customer journey mapping and experience blueprinting are two comple-
mentary methods that can help us see both sides of our services, prod-
ucts, and other offerings.
Journey mapping helps tell the story of what a

A journey map is the customer went through as a narrative, and contains a
detailed view of the richness of the experience, the highs and lows, that
a true story would. You can create a journey map by
frontstage experience.
interviewing customers, leveraging data and other
customer input (e.g. tickets, feedback surveys).
Beyond capturing the current experience your customers are going

through, journey mapping can also be used to imagine and ideate on the
desired future state, using the format as a tool to speculate on what a
customer might see and do in a future experience.
Typically, a journey map is not a depiction of an actual real-world, single

customer experience. A journey map is an aggregate of experiences
compiled from customer research and the knowledge of subject-matter
experts in your organization. The nature of how customers traverse the
stage is unique to every single customer, but when you aggregate those
paths together into a narrative, it helps you see the experience as an
archetypal journey from the customer’s perspective (similar to a persona).
This is a powerful storytelling tool that paints a picture and allows people
a chance to see something the experience a common lens. Journey
mapping builds empathy and also lets you identify areas of the experience
that you want to improve or learn more about. With this empathy-building
tool, you can socialize the iconic customer journey and let others buy-in to
your lens.
Where journey mapping focuses on exposing the end-to-end of your

customer’s frontstage experience, blueprinting focuses on exposing the
surface-to-core of the business that makes up the backstage and behind
the scenes of how you deliver and operate, and ties that to the custom-
er’s experience. The journey map tells the story of the pain on the patient’s
face as they describe how their elbow hurts. Then, you give them the x-ray
(the blueprint) to validate and diagnose the specifics.

Journey Mapping
Journey mapping is a method that enables us to better understand
the experience from the customer’s point of view. It typically contains
several dimensions of information aimed at building empathy and
documenting the various components of the experience:
LAYER DEFINITION EXAMPLES
Sentiment A visual representation of the sentiment of Using a scale of positive to

negative, a line or icons
the customer over the course of the
journey
Doing What the customer is doing at each step "submitting the form" or
"entering the store"
Thinking What the customer is thinking at each step “I am unsure where to find
what I am looking for”
Feeling What the customer is feeling at each step “confused” or “excited”
Touchpoint What the customer is interacting with “store clerk” or “website”
Phase Steps of the journey are often organized “onboarding” or

“purchasing”
into phases
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What journey maps and customer narratives don’t show are the internal
workings of the organization. The blueprint seeks to uncover and docu-
ment (often for the first time!) all the things that go on beneath the surface
and the internal makeup of the organization. It is data visualization of how
your company works—the deep, dark inner workings of how the things a
customer experiences are actually produced.
There are huge complexities that go unseen that are the

support structures beneath every journey—the respon-
Blueprinting unpacks sibilities of the internal actors, the systems that support
the surface-to-core of those actors, all the processes and policies that dictate
the business that makes what can and cannot be done. Blueprinting shows you
a picture that not only includes the breadth of what
up the backstage.
happens along the journey, but all the depth that makes
up the substance that the journey traverses across.
Imagine being in the audience of a major Broadway production of the

hottest new play. You can very accurately “journey map” your experience
as an attendee, from buying your ticket to seeing the play to going home
with the crumpled program afterward; but an audience member has no
idea what went on behind the curtain to make their experience the way
it is. The cost of the set, the contracts with the actors, the faulty sound
system that had to be replaced at the last moment, the licensing issues
with the playwright…
The list is endless, and while a crisp representation of the play’s audience
member is important and necessary, but no journey map actually tells you
how to fix anything that occurs in the downs, or how to enhance anything
that occurs in the ups. While you can use a journey map to envision ways
an experience could be improved, this vision only becomes reality when
you design the delivery.
While journey mapping can help you document surface customer experi-
ences, blueprinting helps you “evidence” the reality of your organization.
The fundamental value a blueprint provides is an objective picture based
on the reality of your organization, what it delivers, and the end-to-end
view of how it is orchestrated. That is what the blueprint uncovers—the
backstage that is used over and over again by the customers. We map

customer experiences all the time, but rarely do we take the time to map
out our own businesses.
An experience is only as cohesive as the teams that produce it, and any
attempt to make meaningful changes to an experience requires a deep
understanding of the makeup of the organization that builds the stage for
that experience. Blueprinting is not about documenting the customer expe-
rience. It uses the customer experience as a starting point and unpacks it
to expose how the organization supports that journey.
It is important then, before blueprinting, to at least have some idea of what

the experience is that you will blueprint—the end-to-end journeys (which
we refer to as scenarios) that will anchor us in our blueprinting.
But before we get into how to pick which scenarios to blueprint, let’s talk
about the two kinds of experience blueprints you can make: current-state
and future-state.
Chapter Two
Current-state
vs. future-state
blueprinting
Even though blueprinting looks very similar in process and format when
applying it to improving existing experiences vs. designing new ones, the
function that the blueprint plays is dramatically different in current state vs.
future state!
Current-state blueprinting looks at an existing experience to answer the

following questions:
• What is the current customer experience of this service/offering for

particular scenarios?
• How is the organization delivering that experience through processes,

systems, people, policies, and more?
• How might we improve our delivery to support a better experience for

the customer?
In this way, current-state blueprinting is an “audit” of the current experience

and organizational practices that result in that experience.
27
Future-state blueprinting, however, is about inventing something new,
both for the customer and the organization.
When you are trying to imagine a new offering, there are several factors to
consider:
• What should we be offering? What need does it solve for the customer?
Is there a business case for solving that need? Does this fit within our
organization’s portfolio, brand, and capabilities?
• What is the ideal customer experience? What will truly be the best
experience that customers wish to have? How might we find this out?
How might we test this?
• How feasible is the ideal experience? Is our blue-sky desired

experience realistic to deliver? Do we have the capabilities to deliver it,
and if not, what are our gaps?
• How might your organization deliver the desired experience? How

might we pilot this new offering? What could we bootstrap today to test
our assumptions? Then how could we scale that implementation to fully
offer the service or product? What resources would we need? What
realistically can your organization deliver, and when?
When you are defining a new offering, you are both imagining an ideal
experience for the customer, but also imagining a business model (or
service model) that can support consistent, quality delivery of that expe-
rience. You are inventing a new offering! There is no aspect of this that is
easy. Future-state blueprinting can help your team to balance the tough
conversations about resourcing, process, systems, implementation, and
support that are necessary in order to create a great, new customer
experience.
Current-state blueprinting Future-state blueprinting
• What exists today • Inventing something new
• How delivery creates the • Designing a new experience

experience • Designing how the organization
• Opportunities for improvement will deliver

Amazingly, blueprinting can do both current-state and future-state. It is an
incredibly flexible and powerful tool. Next, we’ll go a bit deeper into each
way to use blueprinting.
Current-state blueprinting:
why, when, and how to prepare
Why would you do current-state blueprinting?
Current-state blueprinting is hugely beneficial for organizations that suffer
from “siloed” delivery (who doesn’t?). It brings a cross-functional group
together to gain a shared understanding of what is actually happening front
and backstage, and brainstorm together to solve complex problems.
The benefits of current-state blueprinting are the following:
• Make sense of existing, complex systems—when you have inherited or

stepped into a collection of systems, touchpoints, processes, the current-
state blueprint can help bring order to what might have been previously
unbridled chaos.
• Shared understanding across business silos of how your organization

delivers the experience—often organizations aren’t even aware of the
end-to-end, surface-to-core picture of how they deliver, and what the
experience is.
• Shared understanding of how the backstage results in the customer’s

experience—by looking end-to-end, you can see how processes,
systems, or policies might be causing customer pain and explore root
cause.
• Identification of improvement opportunities—both in how to improve

the customer experience as well as the backstage delivery process.
• Alignment across stakeholders—by looking at the service or product

holistically, we gain a shared organizational understanding and can more
easily align on directions for improvement.

What you get from current-state blueprinting
The output of the current-state blueprinting process is a concrete list of
opportunities to improve the experience and the backstage. These could
be short-term tactical fixes, or longer-term strategic directions to explore.
You would then feed these to the appropriate teams and backlogs, or
surface to leadership to move forward at a strategic level. This is your
action plan.
A more intangible output of current-state blueprinting (yet is often just as

powerful as the action plan) is the cross-functional understanding of the
holistic, end-to-end of what’s currently happening in the scenario, and the
alignment across business silos on the direction you think you should head
for improvements.
When to make a current-state blueprint

Current-state blueprinting can be especially impactful when you have a
specific opportunity for improvement, either for the customer or the busi-
ness that spans multiple touchpoints, teams, or offerings. When you feel
you have an incomplete understanding, or that there is disjointed delivery
across business silos, or when you know there is a cumulative impact of
the end-to-end system across different areas of the business that you are
having trouble improving. Or if there is a high priority problem, or an expe-
rience/business breakdown that needs investigating, this is when to bring
out the current-state blueprint.
A blueprint can help solve for broken, painful, or inconsistent customer

experiences where your teams have been having trouble getting to the
root of the issue, because perhaps there are more systemic issues going
on with your business.
It can also help improve inefficiencies in the backstage that might be

slowing things down, or help fix breakdowns between business silos, iden-
tifying gaps in communication that can manifest themselves in the customer
experience. Blueprinting is great for identifying problems upstream that
lead to effects felt downstream for the customer.

Blueprinting is a great tool for tackling fuzzy areas where teams aren’t
aligned and aren’t on the same page around your offering, as it creates the
space to hold the right conversations to facilitate improvement.
Additionally, current-state blueprinting is a great foundational tool for

gaining a shared understanding of how things are happening today, and
where the opportunities are to make it better. In this way, doing current-
state blueprinting during discovery can help get that (often for the first
time) holistic view of the business and the experience, and gain a shared
understanding and alignment of your stakeholders. This is a fantastic
activity to do before setting new organizational strategy or priorities.
When to do current-state blueprinting
• When there is a concrete customer pain point
• When there are inefficiencies or breakdowns behind the scenes that are
impacting the customer
• When teams aren’t aligned or are feeling fuzzy around what current-state is
• During discovery—before setting organizational strategy or priorities
Before you make a current-state blueprint…

The main thing you need to decide as an organization before doing a
current-state blueprint is what scenarios you want to blueprint—in other
words, what opportunity spaces in your organization need improvement?
Do you have problematic customer engagement channels? Phases of your
experience that are particularly challenging? Repeat customer support
tickets on a certain issue? Or a particularly confusing or painful operational
delivery that you want to unpack and understand how this connects with
and impacts the customer?
Before current-state blueprinting, you need to decide what to blueprint,

and start to gather enough information to inform your blueprint:
• Where does the scenario start and end?—What are the bounds of the
scenario (what is in scope)? Where are we focusing?

• What teams or roles are involved in the end-to-end of the scenario?—
You will want to assemble a cross-functional team from these groups/
roles to participate in blueprinting.
• What are the problems we are trying to solve?—What is the core driver
for why you want to improve either the experience or the backstage
delivery?
• What is the current experience?—You will want to gather enough real

data or customer insights to accurately represent the end-to-end of a
typical customer experience for your scenario. Since blueprinting looks
through the lens of the experience at the business, this is important as an
input to current-state blueprinting.
Future-state blueprinting: why,

when, and how to prepare
Why would you do future-state blueprinting?
Conversely, future-state blueprinting is an invaluable and often missing tool
to enable cross-functional teams to align on and envision how they might
deliver a new or improved experience. It is fundamentally an organizational
design activity. It helps us envision the experience we want people to have,
and design the way we as an organization might deliver that experience.
Here are the reasons you would do future-state blueprinting
• You’re trying to do something that hasn’t been done before—Green

field, blank slate, blue sky… you name it. When you’re starting from
square zero, the future-state blueprint is your biggest lever for conscious,
sane planning of the complex systems needed to make your new thing a
reality.
• Explore feasibility of the desired experience—Because blueprinting

helps you break down all the surface-to-core of your organization’s
delivery, doing this with a cross-functional team can help you explore
the feasibility of your desired experience from an implementation and
support standpoint. Things you thought might be a great idea might be
completely impossible to implement.

• Adjust the desired experience to match the capabilities of your
organization—If you discover during blueprinting that your big vision is
in fact too big, you can use this opportunity to adjust and redefine the
desired experience to something more feasible. If this happens, you will
want to make sure to leverage your pre-work on problem framing and
value proposition to ensure your team stays aligned to your “north star”
even if you are reducing the “magic” of the service experience you had
hoped to deliver.
• Define an “MVP” of how your organization might deliver the desired

experience—You can use the blueprinting format to explore and test out
(hypothetically) a model for delivery, and if you so desire, you can focus
your team on first defining a minimal implementation instead of going
after the bigger blue-sky vision. This can be helpful for teams to rapidly
stand up pilot models to test their concepts.
• Gain alignment across all business silos and stakeholders about

the desired experience, and how will we deliver that experience as
an organization—By bringing together a cross-functional team to map
out your new delivery model, you will gain shared understanding and
alignment across teams as to both what you are trying to deliver to
the customer, and how you will work together efficiently to deliver that
experience.
• Create a checklist for development and implementation—One of the

best outcomes of future-state blueprinting is the concrete “checklist” for
implementation and planning. You literally can “harvest” your blueprint for
action items to put straight into your project plans and backlogs.
What you get from future-state blueprinting

The output of a future-state blueprint is a first pass of a concrete, action-
able implementation plan that will help you to develop the business’s capa-
bilities to deliver your desired experience. It details out the roles that need
to be defined, the policies that need to be vetted and written, the tech-
nical systems that need to be procured or developed, the processes that
need to get figured out, and the touchpoints that need to get designed and
created. This is extremely actionable and will let you size the work, create
roadmaps, and discuss how the organization will move forward.

When to make a future-state blueprint
Future-state blueprinting is best done when you have a high level idea of
what you want the desired future-state experience to be—a vision, story-
board, or map of an ideal experience you want to deliver. In other words,
if you don’t know what exists today and what experience you are trying to
create, you are not ready to do future state blueprinting, as the blueprint
is focused on the details of organizational delivery, not on inventing the
desired customer experience from scratch.
It is great to do future-state blueprinting after you have done current state

blueprinting as a way to further define how the improvements you identi-
fied in current-state blueprinting will be realized and implemented. If you
have both the current and future state blueprints, you can do a gap anal-
ysis between the two to create an inventory of all the work you need to do
to get from “now” to the “future.”
Of course, through the process of blueprinting, you can be iterative, and

adjust the customer experience to fit the limitations of the delivery model
you are designing. This is a natural part of the process, and why future
state blueprinting takes more time than current state blueprinting does.
Before you make a future-state blueprint…

Because of the complexity of envisioning new experiences and the busi-
ness models and structures to support those experiences, you will need
more than just future-state blueprinting to help your team through this
process.
Before you dive into future-state blueprinting, you need to already have
defined your desired experience at a high level. The reason is, the blue-
printing format works best when you already know what specific steps of
the customer experience you want to support. The “meat” of future-state
blueprinting is all about breaking down those steps to explore how the
organization might be able to deliver that experience. There are a number
of techniques you can use to explore what you should be offering and to
imagine the future state before you start blueprinting.

We encourage you to consider the following activities before doing
future-state blueprinting
• Current-state blueprinting—If you are looking to innovate on a service

or offering that your organization already provides, it will be hugely
beneficial to ground yourself on understanding how you currently
deliver it today. This can lay the foundation for thinking about reinventing
your current offering into something different. If you do current-state
blueprinting first, you can also use this to do a gap analysis between
current and future state for implementation planning.
• User research—Go out into the field and learn what problems your
customers (or potential customers) are having, their pain points, their
desires. Some techniques you might use are: user interviewing, surveys,
market research, contextual inquiry. This research should inform the
foundation of your problem framing, helping you make a clear business
case for your new offering.
• Problem framing—Make sure your organization is aligned on solving the

right problem for the customer. Don’t just jump at the most obvious thing,
but instead use abstract laddering, problem tree analysis, or Jobs To Be
Done to help your team narrow in on the right problem that your service
will solve for.
• Value proposition—Define the value proposition for your new offering.

What problem is it solving, for who, and what value will it provide? This
should be your guiding “north star” to help your team stay aligned
through the future-state design process.
• Storyboarding—Leverage your customers and your team to generate

high-level storyboards that start to define the specific aspects of the ideal
experience. Sketching different phases of the journey, and playing with
different types of experiences you might create to satisfy the customer
need and fulfill your value proposition.
• Future-state journey mapping—Going deeper than high-level

storyboarding, use a journey map format (doing/thinking/feeling) to break
down the specific steps you think should be part of your future-state
experience. Get more concrete here and outline all the steps a user
might take for key scenarios of your service (e.g., learning about your
service/product, signing up, first-time use, regular use, getting support).

The outcome of these activities is a clear direction for the new offering, and
a specific, desired customer experience defined. Once you have this, you
can begin to detail out how it will deliver the desired experience. In other
words, if you don’t know what experience you want to create, you are
not ready to do blueprinting, as it is focused on the details of experience
delivery, not on defining the desired future-state experience.
Going from current-state to

future-state with blueprinting
Blueprinting is a powerful tool that bridges business delivery and the expe-
rience. It lets you audit the way the experience is delivered today, and
plan for how to design and deliver a new or improved experience. There
are a few different ways to string together these methods to best suit your
organization’s needs.
You can focus on moving fast, and rapidly get to action after even just
one current-state blueprint exercise… or you can be a bit more deliberate,
and do future-state blueprinting after current-state so that you can under-
stand the gap between what is today and what could be in the future, and
explore how to get there. If you are designing a brand new experience, or
want to start from scratch, you may jump in at future-state blueprinting.
We can explore this more with a metaphor! Think for a minute about the
difference between renovating an old house and building a house from
scratch on a bare patch of dirt.
A current-state blueprint lets you come up with a plan for rehabbing an

worn, well-loved Victorian mansion somewhere along the Maine coast.
You can gut it down to the studs if you wanted, but you are still largely
constrained by the macro architecture, properties of the original mate-
rials used, the foundation it all rests on, and possibly considerations on the
street or zoning district. No matter how much you renovate, no one would
ever consider it “new” like they would a house built from the literal ground
up.
There are too many unavoidable and intractable facets to the renovation
you simply cannot change—and shouldn’t! The point of a renovation, even

For existing experiences, and moving faster toward fixing things...
1 2 3 4
Current State Implement new Assess

Action Plan
Blueprinting experience delivery improvements
What exists today Based on insights, make a Go forth and make it happen! Did it work?
plan to improve things
For making something new, that builds on something that already exists...
1 2 3 4
Current State Future State See step

Gap analysis Action Plan 3 above
Blueprinting Blueprinting
What exists today Where we want to be What it would take to get there A plan to roll out the new
experience delivery
For making something brand new from scratch
1 2 3 4
Future State Implement new Assess the

Action Plan
Blueprinting experience delivery experience
Imagine how the experience A plan to implement the Go forth and make it happen! Is it a good experience?
will be delivered new experience delivery
a costly one, is that you want to maintain the advantages of what works
(location, floorplan, historical value) and replace what doesn’t. That is when
you start with current-state blueprinting.
Conversely, if you have the opportunity to start building on that bare patch
of dirt, you’re now building the house without the constraints of what exists,
and instead replacing those with the constraints of what is possible and
how to make one choice or another.
This is the future-state blueprint. Instead of having to deal with some-

thing that exists and improving it tactically, you’re having to deal with the
ambiguity of the unknowns and the compromises that arise when you can
do anything but you can’t do everything. The trick is to understand when
you should renovate via a current-state blueprint vs. start fresh with a
future-state.

Chapter Three
The format of a
blueprint
A blueprint has a few key elements to it, regardless of whether you are
doing current-state or future-state blueprinting:
• From left to right: A scenario broken down into high-level phases and
detailed through linear steps (the end-to-end)
• From top to bottom: the layers of the blueprint showing the details of
each step of the scenario (the surface-to-core)
Phases
The Scenario
Steps
Layers
39
Scenarios to blueprint
The scenario is the thing you are blueprinting—the end-to-end linearly
through time of the experience and the “invisible” steps happening back-
stage to support it. Think of it as the critical path for that particular expe-
rience. You are sequencing how the system manifests itself when it is
experienced by a customer, not just the customer’s journey. This is an
important distinction to become comfortable with, because at first it may
not feel like you’re being customer-focused as the bulk of blueprinting
focuses on the backstage.
Remember—just because you’re not looking solely at the customer expe-

rience doesn’t mean you’re not working on improving it or building better
systems for them to experience. You’re doing things that may not be
directly seen or felt, but act as the substrate and medium that the customer
passes through. Like a fish who isn’t aware of water, ensuring it is clean
and safe is still critical to that fishy’s experience.
A scenario is situational, concrete, and specific. This

matters because what you will unearth through blue-
A scenario is a concrete printing is different depending on different scenarios.
story showing the Let’s look at a few examples to illustrate this point.
steps of the experience Let’s say you are a store that sells shoes. You might have
and the business multiple brick-and-mortar physical stores in different
linearly through time. locations, as well as an online store where people can
shop for your shoes. Additionally, your shoes might be
available through Amazon or other distributors.
If you think of all the touchpoints that a customer could interact with like
an ecosystem, you can imagine there are a myriad of ways for a customer
to experience (or traverse) the ecosystem. There is no way we can map
and blueprint all the different possible paths and combinations of these
unique experiences. However, we can pick impactful ones that will give
us coverage of a majority of important touchpoints and business opera-
tions. By selecting a smaller handful of impactful scenarios, the other expe-
riences not covered will benefit from improvements made, as they likely
share many similar touchpoints and systems, processes, and policies.

In our shoe store example, you can’t simply blueprint a customer journey
of “purchasing shoes,” as there are several very different ways a customer
can traverse the ecosystem of the shoe company’s offerings and touch-
points. You need to get more concrete, and select which scenario you want
to blueprint.
For example, we can make the scenario more specific by narrowing it to “a

customer experience purchasing shoes through our online store.” Even this
specificity may not be enough if there are different ways in the online store
to purchase that have different backstage implications.
If you have multiple paths a customer can take, you may want to select
what to blueprint based on analytics, looking at how the majority of
customers purchase shoes in your online store—is it through browsing the
catalog, or through a shoe-picker interactive tool, or through chatting with
a customer representative? Additionally, what if your business also offers
subscription services through your online store (think StitchFix for shoes)?
Each of these is a unique scenario that results in a different blueprint.
• Example scenario 1: Purchase shoes in the physical store

You will want a store manager and frontline service staff representative
to participate, as well as anyone who handles inventory delivery and
stocking for the physical store
• Example scenario 2: Purchase through browsing the catalog

You will want your product design team involved in the catalog to be
present, as well as any engineers or data scientists who are involved in
developing the algorithms for product display and suggestions in the
catalog experience

• Example scenario 3: Purchase through shoe-picker interactive tool
You will want the product owner and designers who made the shoe-
picker interactive tool, the developers (as this is likely a specialized team
for a feature like this), as well as folks who understand the analytics of
how this tool is used, or a user researcher who may have insight into
customers using this tool
• Example scenario 4: Purchase through conversation with chat

representative
You will want representatives from customer support or actual chat
representatives to join your blueprinting session and speak to trends in
chat support, as well as how the chat support is run operationally
• Example scenario 5: Purchase through monthly shoe styling

subscription service
You will want the business owner for the subscription service, as well as
a senior stylist, to speak to how the shoe styling process works, as well
as any customer support staff or inventory management staff who are
specific to this service.
You can see in these above scenario examples how the specifics of the
scenario drives who needs to be present at your blueprinting session.
While, of course, there will be a lot of overlap, there are nuances that are
critically important that certain roles can speak better to.
When picking scenarios for current-state blueprinting, remember to

ground these in real customer data. You may already have this data in
your organization if you collect customer feedback at various points in the
journey, or if you have a research team talking to customers. You can also
work with customer support or other frontline staff who are subject matter
experts and who can accurately represent the customer journey.
If you don’t know that your customer journeys are accurate, make sure to
validate with customer research first to ensure you are solving a concrete,
real-world problem and not just going on assumptions. It is important to
understand the customer experience and map that journey as the basis for
creating your scenarios.

How to select scenarios, and how many to pick
Though this may seem overwhelming to think of all the potential varia-
tions and unique scenarios you could blueprint, we highly recommend
that you don’t try to blueprinting everything. Each scenario gives you
coverage of the experience landscape, and by covering a few key angles
through different scenarios, you get a majority of the essential touchpoints,
processes, systems, roles, policies that set the stage for most experiences.
We take an 80/20 approach to this. Don’t try for 100% coverage—you won’t
get it or it will take way too long. By looking through a few key scenarios,
you will capture the bulk of the opportunities for improvement on the
majority of the business systems involved in delivery—enough to get you
going and be actionable. In this way, you promote a customer-centered
approach to iterative and agile business improvement.
We suggest a simple framework for selecting scenarios to blueprint
• Primary success path scenarios — What is the primary expected path that
the majority of customers are experiencing—the most common experience,
or the experience you want most people to have. We can think of this as the
“success path” for the experience.
• Secondary success path scenarios — Additionally, you might pick some

secondary “success paths” that have key variations you want to cover (like in
our shoe store example, if the primary success path is online store purchase,
secondary paths might be brick-and-mortar, or chat representative).
• Problem path scenarios — Lastly, and especially for the current state, you
will want to pick the “broken” experiences—experience paths that are painful
and somewhat common (repeatable and known) that you know you need
to fix. Often these are actually the most fruitful scenarios to blueprint when
looking at the current state.
Imagine a bell curve where the center of the curve is a scenario that most
of your customers experience. On either side of that experience on the
curve are a few more scenarios that don’t have quite the same volume, but
they spread out laterally a little more. Then, down toward the sloping edge

of the bell, you have a scenario or two on either side that encompasses
important experiences, but are not anywhere near as populated as the
more centrally aligned scenarios.
If you take this approach, even the smaller sub-scenarios or variants are
going to be caught in that meaty-middle of the curve, and the overlap on
the sides captures a great deal of the less-common—but still relatively
frequent—scenario experiences. Once you have that, the edge-cases
and oddballs won’t have nearly the impact to the aggregate of experi-
ences since you’re making a massive impact holistically, even though it’s
not capturing every discrete case individually.
It doesn’t have to. This is one of the few times
A few key scenarios will when the phrase “a rising tide raises all ships”
give you good coverage of isn’t just a clever saying, it’s the fundamental
the experience landscape. tenet of why this method works, and why you
don’t need to blueprint everything.
What multiple blueprints get you

By blueprinting multiple scenarios (making more than one blueprint), you
get multiple dimensions into the business system and how it’s experi-
enced. No service or product has a single experience—there are many
ways that a customer could experience your offering. So take a handful of
key scenarios and blueprint each one. By doing this, you’ll get a triangu-
lated view of the bigger picture of your business.
When picking scenarios, pick some that are broad enough to have a little
overlap to get coverage of the holistic view of your business system. Don’t
map out every single customer experience. Instead, choose a handful of
the key experiences that might cover the top different experiences you are
seeing your customers have.
By looking across several blueprints, you get an aggregate view of every-

thing you offer and similar kinds of breakdowns and opportunities that are
taking place in your organization. This leads to insights that are more
scenario-agnostic and can help assist with more systemic issues in your
organization.

Phases and the experience
lifecycle
IIt is helpful to organize your scenario into higher level phases to ground
your understanding of the scope and bounds of the scenario (where does
it start and end), and also because different phases are often owned by
different parts of the business, and you will need different people to join
the blueprinting session depending on the phase. Phases can also help
you break up the blueprint into more manageable chunks and focus on
higher priority sections.
Both services and products follow a high level standard experience life-
cycle that we can use as a guide to discussing and selecting impactful
scenarios to focus on. Your scenario might cross a few key phases of the
experience lifecycle, or cover the entire thing end-to-end if your product or
service experience is less complex.
Scenarios across the product ←→ service landscape

In the previous section, we walked through a wide range of different
scenarios for how a customer might experience purchasing shoes. These
scenarios span what we call the product ←→ service landscape.
Read our article “The Difference Between a Product and a Service – As Told With Hammers” here → https://pbd.pub/hammers
One way to understand this is to think of a spectrum where on the far left is
a physical hammer. This is an example of a simple product, the hammer—a
tool that a customer might purchase to get a job done (for example, hang
pictures on the wall by nailing in picture nails). This end of the spectrum is
“product.” On the other end, we have services. This might be a person who
you hire to come hammer nails for you, or it might be a service that helps
create photo prints based on your favorite family moments and delivers
these custom prints to your home in ready-made kits to hang on the wall.

The experience lifecycle
The main difference between a service and a product is that a service
provides and performs for the customer, not just an “object” that is
acquired. This also means that the service provider is taking on a great
deal more risk, ownership, and responsibility, which requires the orga-
nizational systems and business plans to be able to maintain those
commitments.
There’s no “buyer beware” when it comes to services because, often,

it’s a sale you have to re-win every single month. Gone are the days of
limited warranties and expiration periods. If you’re offering a service, you
only get paid when you deliver again, and again, and again… and again…
Because of this, services inherently have a relationship with the customer
over time.
A product also has a time-based experience for the person purchasing and
using it, though many services establish ongoing or longer-term relation-
ships with the customer (examples: utilities like your cell phone contract,
or subscription software licensing and support model, or healthcare). Both
services and products consistently follow the lifecycle.
Phases of the Experience Lifecycle
• Unaware: Before the customer even knows about the service or product
• Aware: The customer learns about it
• Assess: The customer is interested, and considering it
• Buy (or Contract/Sign up): The customer signs up, purchases, or

contracts to receive the service or product
• Receive: The customer has the product or service “in hand”—often this
includes initial onboarding or packaging
• Early Use: The customer is setting up and using it for the first time (think
“first-time use”)
• Normal Use: The customer is a regular, more experienced user of the

service or product, and this is their normal experience of it working well

• Change (more applicable to services): During normal use, the service
changes (e.g. “new feature launched!” or “major upgrade”) and it impacts
the customer (what is the experience around this change?)
• Incident: During normal use, the customer experiences a failure (e.g. an

outage, a botched delivery, a broken part) and it impacts the customer
(what is the experience around this incident?)
• Reconsider: The customer reconsiders their “contract” or purchase, and

thinks about leaving or no longer using their product
• Leave (or Stop): The customer leaves the service or stops using the
product (and disposes of it) (what is their lasting impression?)
Because people experience the purchasing
Use the experience lifecycle to and use lifecycle of a product similarly to the
way they experience the purchasing and use
discuss where to zoom in and
of a service, you can refer to the experience
what scenario to blueprint. lifecycle to narrow in on phases that you
want to blueprint.
You might want to focus in on the onboarding phase or early use phase of
your service or product (yes, a product also has onboarding and first-time
use, for example: imagine purchasing a new appliance or a piece of furni-
ture—the “onboarding and early use” phase would include the unboxing,
assembly instructions or manual, first-time use, what if something is broken
and needs customer support, etc.). Or perhaps you want to focus on the
customer support phase when a customer has an issue or a question.
The experience lifecycle can be a great tool to discuss and narrow in on
specific scenarios you want to explore in blueprinting.
While there is much debate in the design world about products vs.
services, the reality is that people experience both similarly through time,
and we can look at a time-based, linear scenario for purchasing regardless
of whether it’s a product sitting on a shelf that someone purchases or a
service being provided once or repeatedly over a longer time period.
Because of this, we do not believe blueprinting needs to be limited to

service experiences, and this is the main driver for why we prefer to use
“experience blueprint” instead of “service blueprint.”

Example scenarios broken into phases
Let’s return to our shoe company example and break some of these
scenarios down into phases. You’ll notice that there are many overlap-
ping high level phases across these scenarios, but several that are unique
to the scenario. By looking at it this way, you can explore which scenarios
(and which parts of which scenarios) you want to plan to blueprint, and you
can start to think of which teams to bring in to speak to different compo-
nents of the scenario.
Example scenario 1: Purchase shoes in the physical store
Discover the store Finding options Compare and select Purchase Fulfillment Wears the shoe Discards the shoe
Wearing the shoe is not an

These phases are unique to this scenario as it's a physical store vs. digital
experience you directly deliver,
so you may choose not to
Example scenario 2: Purchase through browsing the catalog blueprint it
Discover the store Finding options Compare and select Purchase Fulfillment & Delivery Wears the shoe Discards the shoe
This might be your primary scenario for digital purchasing, so look at it end-to-end
If your company offered a
shoe recycling program,
you might blueprint that
Example scenario 3: Purchase through shoe-picker interactive tool
Discovers the app Customize shoe Purchase Fulfillment & Delivery Wears the shoe Discards the shoe
This is a unique way to make a custom shoe, so Customized shoe

these phases will be different in this scenario fulfillment is unique
Example scenario 4: Purchase through conversation with chat representative
Discovers the store Finding options Compare and select Purchase Fulfillment & Delivery Wears the shoe Discards the shoe
These phases are covered in scenario 2
This is the only unique part of this
scenario, as it relies on chat
Example scenario 5: Purchase through monthly shoe styling subscription service
Discover the Complete sign First Fulfillment & Compare and Return Wears the Discards the Leaves the
service up ShoeStyle Delivery purchase shoes shoe shoe service
This is an almost completely different service, even though it may rely on similar shoe inventory You might want to
blueprint this phase of the
service experience

Steps of the scenario
In order to effectively blueprint, we have to break the scenario down into
more concrete, detailed steps (remember back to being concrete and
specific with your scenario? This is where that happens!)
Once you identify your scenario and who needs to

be in the session, you will want to work with your
Work with subject matter
subject matter experts ahead of time to break your
experts to break down scenario down into steps. This is important prep work
each scenario into steps to do before blueprinting.
before you blueprint!
When breaking down your scenarios into steps, think
about the specific actions that are happening in what
order, kind of like theater and blocking a play: where are actors entering,
when do props and sets change and who does what?
Level of detail in your steps

Blueprinting is most effective at a certain level of zoom—the steps need
to be at the level of the key action. If you are too zoomed out (looking
very high level), you will be covering way too much into each step and not
benefiting from the process. Your steps will feel bloated and confusing. If
you zoom in too much, you get too much repetition step-to-step and it will
feel tedious and redundant. There is a “Goldilocks” sweet spot level of
detail in your steps that will feel “just right.”
Make sure your steps are at the right level of granularity. For example, a
step that is too big is, “customer goes to the website and finds what they
are looking for.” That is way too vague and encompasses too many actions
on the part of the customer or the system/backstage. Now, a step that is
too detailed might be, “customer clicks on this button” (unless that button
triggers a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes!).
Your steps should be more like actions, for example, “customer uses
search to find an article.” The next step would be, “customer browses
search results, and clicks to an article.” These are the right level of gran-
ularity where they are capturing the primary actions happening in the
scenario.

Step detail… like Goldilocks, we want the level of detail to be just right!
Too detailed: Just right Too broad
• Customer clicks on Shoe A • Customer browses product • Customer visits website
• Customer reviews Shoe A product catalog to find category page • Customer purchases shoes
details • Customer browses shoes • Customer receives shoes
• Customer Clicks on menu to go to • Customer selects shoes to
full catalog compare
• Customer clicks on Shoe B • Customer compares shoes
• Customer clicks “compare shoes” • Customer selects one and and
• Customer selects shoes to adds to cart
compare • Customer clicks checkout
• Customer reads comparison data • Customer completes purchase
• Customer clicks on Shoe A • Customer gets email receipt
• … you get the idea • Fulfillment processes the order for

shipment
How many steps should you have?

A good scenario has about 15-20 steps. If you are getting too big, break
it into phases and tackle each separately. If you don’t have enough, you
might not be thinking wide enough about the start and end points of your
scenario. In this case, go back to the experience lifecycle to see where you
can expand the bounds of your scenario.
Visible and hidden steps

A step can be visible to the customer (a step that the customer sees or
does something) or hidden (backstage to the business behind the scenes).
We can indicate these by light and dark steps. This lets us illustrate the
linear left to right of the experience and how it’s delivered.

Visible steps Hidden steps
The Scenario
This is where we start to see the difference between a blueprint and a

journey map. A blueprint will not only include the customer-facing steps but
also the critical backstage steps in linear order. Together, these make up
the full picture of the end-to-end scenario and all the dependencies on the
backstage.
How to handle branching and variations

In blueprinting, we go left-to-right in a straight path through a chosen
scenario. We understand that the reality of an experience or delivery likely
will have branching points (points where for a particular experience path,
some customers may branch off and have different experiences) or true
variations (where each experience path doesn’t really share the same
experience as the other).
This is completely typical to have complexity in the variety of scenarios for

your service or offering. However, to benefit most from blueprinting (and
not spend forever looking at every single possible scenario), you really
should pick a smaller set of key scenarios as a “lens” through which to view
the delivery. You want just enough coverage in the scenarios you pick in
order to “peek” into the different aspects of how the organization delivers,
and you actually don’t need to cover every single possible path.
To handle branching, ask yourself whether a particular branch of the

scenario is important to include in your key scenarios. If it is, just map the
parts of the path that are different in a separate blueprint.

Branching The Scenario
5
1 2 1 2 3 4 5
3 4
Variations
4a
1 2 3 6
The Scenario
Primary path
Variations Different in the middle

of the first – pick the primary path
Ends in the 1 2 3 4b 5 6
same place
phase
4b 5 Variation
4a You can just blueprint
the couple steps that
are different as an
6 alternate scenario
Similarly, if a true variation is important enough to blueprint as its own

scenario, just spin up another blueprint to map it as a new scenario. You
may even be able to copy over or reference some of the same steps from
the other blueprint, or indicate where they share steps.
Scenario A
Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4
Scenario B Phase 3b Phase 4b

Cover just the unique phases, and note that this
scenario picks up after Phase 2 of Scenario A
We are not trying to create a process map. That is not the point of blue-
printing (to map every possible branch and variation in a single diagram).
Scenario
Instead, A
we are focusing on the high impact scenarios as a way to get
good coverage of the essential aspects of the backstageAlternatively,
delivery soif that
only a
we can improve the experience. few steps overlap
between two scenarios,
you can color code or
indicate that they are
"shared" steps between
multiple scenarios.
Scenario B
Scenario A
Alternatively, if only a
few steps overlap
between two scenarios,
you can color code or
indicate that they are
"shared" steps between
multiple scenarios.
Scenario B
What to do with concurrent steps

We acknowledge that in reality, there are often concurrent “hidden” steps
in the backstage that are automated or happening while a customer is
doing something. For the sake of the practicality of facilitating the session,
we can flatten these concurrent steps into one linear line.
3, 4, 5, and 6 are concurrent steps which we can stretch

out linearly for the sake of the blueprinting exercise
Visible
3 6
The Scenario
1 2 4 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
5
Hidden
Do your best to keep steps together or near each other if they are concur-
rent and you can make a note above the steps to indicate they happen
concurrently. Listing them left-to-right linearly will not cause any issues or
impact the effectiveness of your blueprinting. In fact, it makes it easier to
tease apart what often feels like a messy, tangled process.
This is something that distinguishes our practical approach from tradi-

tional service blueprinting (which attempts to map arrows, directionality,
and swimlanes all at once), when in a real-life session, it is so much easier
to walk through the scenario step-by-step, left-to-right, and discuss each in
turn.

Example step breakdowns
Let’s go back to our shoe company scenarios to see examples of how
we might break each scenario down into steps. In the example scenarios
on the next page, you can see how they overlap and share some steps,
but not all. Where you see significant differences are good candidates to
create multiple blueprints of difference scenarios in order to get full under-
standing of the backstage.
See “Examples Scenarios” 2-page spread on the next page.

Example Scenarios Spanning the product service landscape
Example scenario 1: Purchase Example scenario 2: Purchase Example scenario 3: Purchase

shoes in the physical store shoes online through browsing through shoe-picker interactive
the catalog tool in app
PHASE: Finding options PHASE: Finding options PHASE: Discovers the app
1 Customer enters the store 1 Customer sees an ad and clicks to 1 Customer sees an ad and clicks to
our website interactive shoe maker app
2 Customer browses the aisles
2 Customer browses product catalog 2 Customer learns about the app
Customer engages a service rep to to find category page Customer downloads the app from
3 3
assist in getting shoes to try on 3 Customer browses shoes the app store
4 Customer indicates which shoe styles 4 Customer opens the app
they want, and their shoe size
PHASE: Compare and select Customer goes through onboarding
Rep goes into back to get shoes to 5
5 screens and instructions
try on
4 Customer selects shoes to compare
6 Rep delivers the shoes to the
PHASE: Customize shoe
customer to try on 5 Customer compares shoes
6 Customer starts the shoe builder and

PHASE: Compare and select selects a base shoe style
PHASE: Purchase
7 Customer customizes their shoe
7 Customer tries on shoes (colors, flair, laces)
6 Customer selects one and and
Customer makes a decision about adds to cart 8 Customer previews their shoe
8 a shoe
7 Customer clicks checkout
8 Customer completes purchase PHASE: Purchase

PHASE: Purchase
9 Customer gets email receipt 9 Customer adds shoes to their cart
9 Customer takes shoes up to the
checkout 10 Customer clicks checkout
Cashier completes purchase and PHASE: Fulfillment & Delivery
10 11 Customer completes purchase
provides receipt
10 Fulfillment processes the order 12 Customer gets email receipt
for shipment
PHASE: Fulfillment
11 Picked up by mail carrier
PHASE: Fulfillment & Delivery
11 Customer takes shoes up to the 12 Tracking notification to customer
checkout Fulfillment processes the order for on-
13
13 Delivery to customer demand shoe making
14 Customer opens their shoes and 14 Factory builds custom shoes

tries them on
15 Factory hands order to processing
17 Tracking notification to customer
18 Delivery to customer
19 Customer opens their shoes and tries

# Hidden step (backstage) them on
# Visible step (frontstage) 20 Customer shares picture of their shoe

in the app

What do these scenarios and steps have in common? What is unique?
Example scenario 4: Purchase Example scenario 5: Use the ShoeStyler subscription service to
shoes through conversation with purchase shoes regularly
chat representative
PHASE: Finding options PHASE: Discover the service
1 Customer sees an ad (or friend refers them) and visits website for ShoeStyler
1 Customer sees an ad and clicks to our
website 2 Customer learns more about ShoeStyler service
2 Customer sees popup prompting
3 Customer decides they want to try it, and signs up
them to get personalized help via chat
to pick a shoe
PHASE: Complete sign up
3 Customer opens the chat and
responds to the prompt “what are you 4 Customer enters their payment and shipping information, shoe size
looking for?”
5 Customer shares their preferences for shoes
4 Chat representative is assigned to the
chat 6 Customer completes setup and is given info for what will happen next
5 Chat representative responds to 7 Style profiles is created for customer in database

customer and asks more questions
8 Stylist is matched with customer
Chat rep makes recommendations for
6
shoes the customer will like
PHASE: First ShoeStyle
PHASE: Compare and select 9 Stylist reviews customer preferences
10 Stylist selects shoe options to send to customer

7 Customer clicks on one or more of the
recommended shoes 11 Stylist completes the order preparation and submits order
8 Customer compares shoes
12 Stylist messages customer a personalized note
PHASE: Purchase PHASE: Fulfillment & Delivery
Customer selects one and and 13 Fulfillment processes the order for shipment
9
adds to cart 14 Picked up by mail carrier
10 Customer clicks checkout
11 Customer completes purchase
12 Customer gets email receipt
PHASE: Compare and purchase
PHASE: Fulfillment & Delivery 17 Customer opens their shoes and tries them on
18 Customer follows instructions for how to complete the purchase for their
13 Fulfillment processes the order shoes using the ShoeStyler site
for shipment 19 Customer receives email receipt for purchase
PHASE: Return shoes they didn't pick
20 Customer packages up shoes they want to return
21 Customer takes package to drop location
17 Customer opens their shoes and
tries them on 22 Return received and processed
23 Customer receives confirmation of return

Layers of the blueprint
The layers of the blueprint are what let us look through the lens of the
customer experience into the business and how it operates and delivers
the experience. This is where the magic happens!
It is best to think of the layers like a checklist that

The layers of a blueprint enables your cross-functional team to have the
are a checklist to enable right conversation. They prompt the group to think
the right conversation about the various different components of how
the experience is delivered, and help you not miss
with your team.
something that might be easy to overlook.
By going deep into each step in the scenario, you can expose the breadth
and depth of the business that supports and produces the stage where
the journey takes place. This process relies on a cross-functional collabo-
ration between different parts of the organization, in order to represent all
aspects of the internal operations.
Common layers to both current and future state

blueprinting
When you think of how an organization sets the stage for delivering an
experience, you need to consider the following core components of expe-
rience delivery:
• Touchpoints—interaction points between the customer and business
• Roles—that staff are playing to deliver the experience
• Technology—technical systems and tools used
• Policies—rules or guidelines that impact the experience
• Processes—support processes that the business follows

As we translate these components to the layers of the blueprint format,
we organize them underneath each step of the scenario. Not every layer
needs to be present in each step, and some layers may have more than
one item in a step. In this way, as you add layers to the blueprint, it creates
a heat map of sorts that lets you see where the complexity lies.

Heatmap reveals which

steps are more complex

The complete anatomy of a blueprint
Now you have a foundational understanding of all the aspects of a current-
state and future-state blueprint: the scenario, phases, steps, and layers that
help you generate actionable insights and designs that lead to great expe-
riences and efficient backstage operations.
Current State Blueprint Template The Scenario
Legend Offering name: replace this with the name of your offering Phases
Scenario name: replace this with a name for your scenario
Phase
Phase Phase
Step Steps
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
(visible)
Step
(hidden)
Touchpoint Layers
Roles
Process
Technology
Policy
Critical
Moments
Opportunities
Metrics
Questions
Notes
Future State Blueprint Template The Scenario
Offering name: replace this with the name of your offering

Legend Phases
Scenario name: replace this with a name for your scenario
Phase
Phase Phase
Step Steps
(visible) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Step
(hidden)
Touchpoint Layers
Roles
Process
Technology
Policy
Potential
pitfalls
Rationale
Questions
Notes

Core layers of an
experience blueprint
LAYER DEFINITION EXAMPLES
Common layers to both current and future-state
Step definition Define what is happening in that step Customer completes purchase, Fulfillment
(hidden or visible to the customer) processes the order
Touchpoints A point of interaction between the Webpage, app, storefront, touchpad, letter,
customer and the business phone call
Roles The roles of people involved in service Operations manager, Cashier, Fulfillment,
delivery (staff or 3rd party) Customer support
Technology Technology systems or infrastructure used Inventory database, Point of Sale system,
in the step Email campaign platform
Policies Rules or guidelines of the organization that Free shipping only within country,
are in play in the step Customers must verify email, Orders only
processed M-F
Processes Support processes that enable the step to Inventory management, Monthly marketing
happen campaign, Product enhancement cycle
Questions Questions or unknowns that you have How are new shoe styles selected? Who is
about the step that need follow up in charge of running reports? What is our
policy on returns?
Any additional info or context from the Greg from sales has a dashboard he
Notes discussion that doesn’t fit in other layers updates regularly showing shoe sales that
might help us with this step.
Current-state layers
Metrics Data or analytics insights that pertain to 60% of customers are browsing for
this step women’s shoes, Average fulfillment time is
32 hours
Critical What can go wrong in this step? Sources of Website loses items in cart (bug), Customers
pain—experience or operational abandon purchase, Fulfillment loses order,
Moments
breakdown (potential or actual) Shipping delays
Opportunities Ideas, “ah-ha” realizations, or opportunities Provide a “don’t forget your cart” email, Use
to improve or fix this step cookies to remind customer what they
browsed last time, Track data on lost orders
Future-state layers
Rationale Known facts, metrics, or insights that Since majority of customers are female,
influence the design of this step feature women’s shoes in banner first.
Potential What will break the experience at this No shoes fit right and customer has to
step? Anticipate and plan for problems return all shoes
Pitfalls
Interlude
Example
Blueprints
The format of the Practical Experience Blueprint has evolved over the
years, from our early prototypes of butcher paper and sticky notes, to our
modern version available in digital whiteboarding tools.
At its core, however, it’s still the same ultra-useful combination of work-
shop, artifact, and actionable insights. Here are a few examples of different
ways we, you, and people we’ve never even met have adapted and used
the format to solve their customer experience problems in ways that fit
their team’s needs!
63
64 Your Guide to Practical Experience Blueprinting - Flowers, Miller
Legend
Stopping bank robbery
Step definition
StealthMan picks up robbery on his police scanner and moves to stop it.
Hidden step definition
Touchpoint 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
Learns about robbery Mobilizes suit and vehicle Stops the bad guys
Actor StealthMan receives StealthMan locates StealthMan

StealthCave system StealthMobile StealthMobile notifies StealthMan uses
SuperSuit activates StealthMan enters StealthMan Police process bad
StealthCave scanner boots up and StealthMan gets into StealthMan gathers StealthMan get in geotracking and butler and tech with StealthMan drives to scanner to assess StealthMan ties up
signal from scene of crime on descends to his tracking, and activates recommended building and fights transports bad guys guys and lock them
scans for crime prepares suit and SuperSuit equipment his StealthMobile targeting system scene of the crime where criminals are bad guys
StealthCave scanner his StealthWatch StealthCave “Crime in progress” equipment the bad guys to police station up
vehicle boots up and their weapons
status
System
StealthCave StealthCave StealthMan's fists on
StealthCave Scanner StealthWatch StealthWatch StealthElevator StealthCave StealthMobile StealthMobile Mobile phones StealthMobile StealthWatch SuperSuit StealthRope StealthMobile Police station cells
SuperSuit chamber equipment wall bad guy's faces
Policy (stun ray, zip line,

StealthComputer Suit (armor),
boomerang,
Police dispatcher StealthMan StealthMan StealthMan StealthMan StealthMan StealthCuffs, StealthMan StealthComputer Butler StealthMan StealthMan weapon selection equipment StealthMobile StealthMan Police
StealthSpray, smoke system (weapons/tactics)
bombs, nets)
Observation / Fact
StealthMobile StealthMobile
PowerScan5000 PowerScan5000 StealthComputer StealthComputer StealthComputer SuperSuit system StealthMan StealthComputer Tech Genius PowerScanner5000 SuperSuit system StealthMan StealthMan Bad Guys Bad Guys
system system
Metric / Data StealthMan has 7 StealthComputer

Scanner shows where Only some equipment
bodies and highlights
minute SLA to reach StealthComputer StealthMobile tracking system links needs to be activated Police computer
Police dispatch Police dispatch Google Maps SuperSuit system Suit weighs 11lb StealthComputer Google Maps and identifies weapons Bad Guys Bad Guys Google Maps
the bottom of the inventory system system StealthMobile location
based on weapon
to be made ready for system
StealthElevator with computer use
signature
Question / Unknown StealthMan has a StealthElevator is a StealthMan "checks

All traffic laws apply
In-visor display StealthMan ties up Capturing and
Technically, this is StealthComputer rule that he only hidden door behind a StealthMobile Getting suited up out" items by StealthMobile shows list of SuperSuit combat bad guys and carries StealthMobile fighting criminals as
Google Maps to StealthMan and
not legal signals StealthWatch fights crime within piano that reveals itself system takes 1:49 removing them from system weapons the defense systems them to back of onboard computer a superhero is
with dramatic music the equipment wall
must be obeyed StealthMobile
the city limits criminals have against the law
Critical Moment Text analysis algorithms

In-ear headphones alert What if there is no StealthSuit has to be Suit zipper
Technology Genius
Sometimes StealthMan uses
In-visor display shows
Police typically make
designs new gear every
StealthMan of the StealthElevator ride prepared into it's StealthMobile has google maps on his Are the bad guys note that bad guys
analyze dispatch for
dispatch, and play the
location identified in sometimes catches two weeks and educates notificaitions don't list of recommended SuperSuit system PowerScanner5000
keywords like "robbery" takes 8 seconds mechanized chamber
StealthMan at a bi- top speed of 150mph phone to drive to the
tactics and equipment conscious? were delivered by a
audio source file the dispatch? after each use in the back come through scene of the crime vigilante
weekly briefing
Idea / Opportunity What is the range on

Sometimes the
StealthMobile turns
Suit is a tight fit and
Why isn't equipment StealthMobile is How does the Violence in public is Sometimes his knot- Last quarter, StealthMan is still
53% accuracy of text location is wrong, or Why is the elevator eating too much 15% of drives incur
the StealthWatch on and seat warmers included in the suit bright red and has scanner know what against the law, as work is not super StealthMan delivers technically a
analysis the criminals have behind a piano? makes it accidents
receiver? turn on chamber? flames weapons there are? are many weapons great 23 criminals vigilante criminal
moved uncomfortable
StealthMan might not StealthCave Dashboard Suit gets cleaned What happens if
StealthWatch battery Driving to police
Scanner receives Elevator has multiple display turns on and Equipment is not StealthMobile is Typically this fight is Ditch the rope, use a
Phase timeline indicator roughly 72 calls a
be wearing
StealthWatch (it is
only lasts around 6
hours before needing
floor buttons, don't loads location of the
once a week and is
unavailble when at
included in suit bright red and has
Often has to re-route
due to traffic
weapons are made
of different
with fists, guns, and more fancy
station makes it easy
for police to try and
Pay off or fund the
police department?
day push the wrong one crime and dispatch chamber flames knives containment system
not waterproof) charged the cleaners materials? catch StealthMan
details
This is a summary of the steps beneath this box.
Car is way too Often scanner is
Text analysis is often Use an Apple watch Google maps is slow noticeable and he Most often bank Leaving bad guys at Work out an
Just 1 button - Multiple SuperSuits Picking the items is a StealthMobile could inaccurate or doesn't
inaccurate and and make a to load in the sometimes gets pulled robberies have 3-5 a secured location arrangement with
StealthCave available waste of time be black over by the cops for
pick up smaller
triggers false alarms StealthApp StealthCave bad guys and notifying police the police
speeding weapons
If we get caught, we Use an Apple watch Often inventory is Use visual camera StealthMan succeeds
Adjustable suit Use more reliable
could go to jail, this and make a out of date or and drone to do and captures all bad
waistbands directions system guys 68% of the time
is illegal StealthApp inaccurate recon instead?
Upgrade speech Equipment loadout

Use better location How many bad guys
analyzer for better Velcro not zippers templates based on Paint car all black
and mapping system get away?
accuracy crime type
Equipment should be
Work in partnership attached to suit in Only fight crime at StealthMan can get
with the police the suit chamber by night? hurt
default
Improve StealthSuit
defense
Questions
What is the range on
Why is the elevator
the StealthWatch
behind a piano?
receiver?
Accurate data Collaboration / Cooperation
What happens if
How does the Text analysis is often Upgrade speech Often inventory is Sometimes Use visual camera If we get caught, we Work out an
weapons are made Pay off or fund the
scanner know what inaccurate and analyzer for better out of date or notificaitions don't and drone to do could go to jail, this arrangement with
of different police department?
weapons there are? triggers false alarms accuracy inaccurate come through recon instead? is illegal the police
materials?
Sometimes the Often scanner is

Leaving bad guys at
How many bad guys Are the bad guys location is wrong, or Often has to re-route Use more reliable inaccurate or doesn't Work in partnership Police could signal
a secured location
get away? conscious? the criminals have due to traffic directions system pick up smaller with the police StealthMan? (pager)
and notifying police
moved weapons
Driving to police
Why isn't equipment What if there is no
station makes it easy
included in the suit location identified in Rebrand --> ? Technology for police to try and
chamber? the dispatch? catch StealthMan
Car is way too StealthMan might not
Not what the city noticeable and he Use an Apple watch
StealthMobile could be wearing
wants, but what the sometimes gets pulled and make a
be black over by the cops for
StealthWatch (it is
city needs StealthApp
speeding not waterproof)
StealthWatch battery
StealthMobile is
Only fight crime at only lasts around 6 Use better location
Paint car all black bright red and has
night? hours before needing and mapping system
flames charged
StealthMan is still Use an Apple watch

technically a and make a
vigilante criminal StealthApp
Simplify / Efficiency Equipment

Suit is a tight fit and Suit gets cleaned
Elevator has multiple Equipment loadout Suit zipper
Just 1 button - eating too much Improve StealthSuit StealthMan can get once a week and is Multiple SuperSuits
floor buttons, don't templates based on sometimes catches
StealthCave makes it defense hurt unavailble when at available
push the wrong one crime type in the back
uncomfortable the cleaners
Equipment should be
Equipment is not Ditch the rope, use a Sometimes his knot-
attached to suit in Picking the items is a Adjustable suit
included in suit more fancy work is not super Velcro not zippers Handcuffs
the suit chamber by waste of time waistbands
chamber containment system great
default

Chapter Four
The process of
blueprinting
The blueprinting process starts with identifying that blueprinting is the right
approach to your needs, then planning and preparing for a cross-functional
team to come together to do blueprinting, and then synthesis of the output
of the blueprint, resulting in an action plan.
The blueprinting sessions themselves are a group activity, and they need
to be done with a cross-functional team in a workshop setting, using the
blueprint format to unpack the surface-to-core of the business that sets
the stage for the customer experience. This is critical, because no one
person understands all the ins and outs of the business (unless you are a
one-person business!).
In order to lead an effective blueprinting session, you’ll want to prepare

the scenario before the session, and identify the right subject matter
experts from across your organization to join. Blueprinting works when it
is approached practically in the context of your organization. To success-
fully get through your blueprint, you’ll want to do enough preparation in
advance to understand the scope of the session, who to invite, and how
much time you will need.
71
High level blueprinting process
Regardless of whether you are doing current-state or future-state blue-
printing, you will generally follow the same high-level process. Something
important to understand is that blueprinting isn’t just a workshop—it is the
process of going from an opportunity space to an action plan, and the blue-
print itself is a tool that helps you get there. Blueprinting is a journey in and
of itself for your organization, and for it to be successful, you’ll want to be
thoughtful about how you embark on the journey and who you take.
At a high level, the process of blueprinting looks like this:
1-2 weeks 1-2 weeks 1-4 weeks 1-2 weeks
1 2 3 4
Planning and
Inception Facilitation Actionable insights
preparation
Aligning on the problem to Defining scenarios, Facilitating blueprinting Going from workshop to
solve, the opportunity assembling your team, sessions with your cross- work, defining a concrete
space, the future vision organizing your sessions functional team action plan based on insights
1) Inception
When embarking on a blueprinting exercise in your organization, you need
to first align on what problem you are trying to solve. This is your oppor-
tunity space—either where you plan to make improvements to what is, or
where you are developing a vision for something new. This is the phase
where you will want to leverage data, research, and other organizational
insights to narrow down and select the key scenarios that will be impactful
to blueprint.

You’ll want to articulate these scenarios using an iconic name (e.g. “Help
desk customer support experience”) and a one-sentence summary that
captures the gist of the scenario, for example, “Many customers are having
painful experiences getting resolution to their delivery issues.” A future-
state example might be, “We envision a seamless, fast, and multichannel
help experience for customers dealing with delivery issues.” Think of this
as a problem or opportunity statement that captures the focus of why this
scenario has been selected.
In this phase, you are starting to build buy-in around these scenarios and
engage key subject matter experts (SMEs) to participate in the process.
You are gaining sponsorship from leaders in your organization, and setting
expectations for what the blueprinting process will be like, and what the
organization can expect from it.
Depending on the scope of the opportunity space and how many

scenarios, or how difficult it is to build momentum with your organization,
this step can be as quick as a week or may take several weeks.
2) Planning and preparation

Now that you have buy-in, and have identified the key scenarios you want
to focus on, you can start to block out the top-level throughline of the steps
in each scenario. This can be done with a blend of solo and group work.
This is not the blueprinting session—it is the rough drafting of the steps and
the surface-level validation that the steps and phases are correct. This can
take some time, as it is important for current-state that this is accurate, but it
doesn’t have to be precise.
Do this preparation with one or two of your key SMEs—the scenario

owner, or someone with deep and broad knowledge of the scenario. The
steps will be validated and reviewed in the blueprinting session itself, so it
doesn’t have to be completely perfect in advance, however it is important
to do this before the blueprinting session ahead of time so you can
pre-populate the blueprint and be ready to go.
For future-state, this may be done as a separate future-state experience

mapping workshop to start to storyboard out the desired customer expe-
rience you want to design. Then you can spend some time converting this
vision to steps in the future-state scenario.
The process of blueprinting 73

3) Facilitation
This is where the actual “blueprinting” happens in a group setting. These
working sessions are where your cross-functional team that you have
assembled goes through and details out all the layers, debates what is
happening in each step, and comes away with actionable insights.
This is where you facilitate the group through the “checklist” of the layers
of the blueprint and guide the conversation to get a comprehensive
surface-to-core view underneath the end-to-end of the scenario. You may
have multiple work sessions to get through your scenarios, using the blue-
printing template to guide the sessions.
4) Actionable insights
After you have completed blueprinting, the work does not end here. You
will pull out the actionable insights from the blueprint to develop a work
plan. For improving current-state, you will end up with tactical short-term
fixes identified, as well as bigger strategic directions for improving the
experience delivery. For future-state, you will end up with a concrete imple-
mentation plan to make the vision for the new experience into an organiza-
tional reality.
Here is where you will want to start sharing out the results of the process,
delegating the work to the appropriate teams and stakeholders, and
getting sponsorship for the next phase of the work. You may create a more
condensed and distilled report to circulate and share broadly across the
organization.
You may have a screenshot of the blueprint template filled out, however,
what you share in this phase is not the blueprint. It is the resulting work
plan, strategy, insights, and direction that resulted from the process. The
actual blueprint artifact itself is no more relevant than the blueprint when
building a house—after you move in, the big roll of paper is just a keepsake
with little relevance now that the house is built or renovated.

Current-state
blueprinting process
Follow these six steps to do current-state blueprinting!
1 Choose the scenarios to blueprint

You choose a collection of important or particularly painful scenario
experiences to blueprint, and these act as use cases you want to
understand.
2 Break scenarios down into steps

Prepare for blueprinting by breaking down each scenario into the linear
steps of the experience (visible step) and backstage (hidden steps).
Blueprint your scenarios.
3 Blueprint your scenarios

Gather your cross-functional team to blueprint the high level end-to-end
view as well as the detailed surface-to-core view of each scenario and
surface actionable insights.
4 Collect questions, critical moments, and ideas

Blueprinting results in a collection of critical moments and ideas that
capture insights into potential improvements to the service or product
offering.
5 Pull out actionable insights

Critical moments are then grouped into strategic themes and tactical fixes
that apply across scenarios, enabling you to plan longer-term holistic
improvements.
6 Take action!
Create an action plan for how to improve the experience delivery, both
the short term tactical fixes that you can do immediately as well as the
long term strategy.
Future-state
blueprinting process
Follow these six steps to do future-state blueprinting!
1 Understand current state

Do customer research, market research, or current state blueprinting to
understand what exists today.
2 Define the desired future state experience

Map or storyboard the high level new experience that you want to create
for your customers. Get clear on your value proposition, and the problem
you are trying to solve.
3 Define the scenarios to blueprint

Identify the key scenarios you want to blueprint (where the experience
starts and ends, and how the customer traverses the experience).
4 Blueprint the future state

Gather a cross-functional team to design how you might deliver the new
experience as an organization!
5 Harvest your blueprint to create an implementation plan

Collect the touchpoints, processes, roles, systems, and policies that you
came up with in blueprinting to develop an implementation plan to realize
your desired future state.
6 Take action!
Put your implementation plan into action by assigning owners and
developing an implementation roadmap.
Chapter Five
Planning and
preparation
In order to successfully guide your cross-functional team through a blue-
printing process, you’ll want to ensure that you’ve done the necessary
planning and preparation. This involves clarifying which experiences you
want to blueprint (the specific, concrete scenarios), getting these scenarios
fleshed out enough before the group session, making sure you have the
right people identified to participate, and the logistics of scheduling, note-
taking, and setting up your template.
As the person guiding the team through the blueprinting process, your
job is part facilitator, part project manager, part leader in the way that you
can organize the work and create the space for the right conversation to
happen. We hope to set you up for success in running this process effec-
tively within your organization.
79
Blueprinting
Prep Checklist
Use this checklist to make sure you’ve done all the necessary
steps to prepare for a successful blueprinting session.
Identify your scenarios
Map the steps of your scenarios (and document touchpoints)
Determine who should be invited to the session
Get someone to be a notetaker/support facilitator for you
Schedule between 2-6 90-minute sessions on everyone’s

calendars (depends on how many scenarios and whether
current-state or future-state—which takes more time!)
Reserve a room if needed, or set up a video conference link
Set up your blueprinting template and pre-fill it with your

scenario and steps
Plan to introduce your team to blueprinting, the tool you will

be using, and the specific scenarios
Get your senior leaders to show up for the kickoff/wrapup,

endorse the workshop and you, and help promote your
efforts (and remind people to take it seriously!)
Selecting your scenarios
As we detail in chapter two, we suggest looking for primary success path
scenarios, secondary success path scenarios, or problem path scenarios to
blueprint.
For current state, we recommend picking 1-4 scenarios to blueprint, and

you may just want to pick the main problem scenario that is painful that you
want to fix. However, don’t just go chasing customer pain. There are cases
when a customer’s experience can be perfectly delightful, but behind-
the-scenes, the organization is going to great lengths to patch it together
and maintain the appearance of cohesion. In reality, you might be losing
tremendous amounts of time, money, and employee morale by main-
taining a great customer experience by using inefficient and painful internal
processes. By blueprinting a primary path scenario, you can look internally
for opportunities to improve the backstage.
For future state, you’ll want to pick the primary success path and a
secondary success path (or two) covering alternate channels (like in-store,
online store, chat support, etc.) if they are important to design for. In
this way, future-state blueprinting may cover a more comprehensive
end-to-end experience with the key variations of the success path, as this
will be important for creating a complete implementation plan to deliver the
desired experience.
Identifying who to invite

Once you’ve selected scenarios, you can better identify who in each
scenario are the subject matter experts (SMEs) who help represent the
end-to-end. You might need people from marketing, account management,
finance, engineering, customer support, or product design to cover the full
extent of the steps taking place in this cross-functional scenario.
Look at the scenario and identify where do subject matter experts live in
the organization (hint: they are not all on the same team), and bring them all
together in the blueprinting session to map the end-to-end and surface-to-
core of the scenario.

Try to pick subject matter experts that are more close to the scenarios.
Executives and VPs—while it is great to get them aligned and exposed to
the process—are too high level and often don’t know what’s going on in
the scenario and can’t contribute to blueprinting. However, you should
try to get them to sponsor you, attend kickoffs and midpoint check-ins,
and wrap-ups. For the blueprinting session itself, you will want to bring
people in who actually know what’s going on in the scenario—this may
be frontline staff or customer support agents, for example—and who can
either be decision makers (or influencers to those who make the decisions)
pertaining to their business function.
You will want to keep your session participants to 6-10

Look across your people. If you have less than 6, you probably don’t have
scenario to understand enough representation across the scenario. If you have
more than 10, it becomes too unwieldy where too many
who should join the
people are talking and the process drags on too long.
blueprinting session. There is a magic sweet spot for collaboration around 6-8
people where you will get extremely productive and fruitful
discussion. If you really have questions that no one in the room can answer,
that’s what the questions layer is for: to capture the things we need more
information about. You can always “parking lot” questions out to other
people or have them on call while you are running the session.
Some example roles you may want to invite to blueprinting:
• Experience SME—Someone who can speak to and understand the

current state customer experience at each phase of the scenario. Often
this might be a customer support person or user researcher, or other
voice of the customer owner.
• Technical—Developers, engineers, or IT staff who can speak to how

things are architected, technical constraints, or feasibility for new ideas.
• Marketing/Communications—Someone who can speak to advertising,

marketing, or communications about the service or product offering.
Often they know about customer acquisition and onboarding.
• Product owners—Someone who owns a key area of the offering. A lead

who can speak to the product strategy, design, and operations. If you
have physical products, they should know about the production pipeline,
inventory management, and fulfillment.

• Designers—Lead designers who can speak to rationale for why
something is designed a certain way, or think creatively of new ideas.
• Customer support—If your offering has a support component, you will

want someone who can speak to the various channels of customer
support, and the operations for how this is run in your organization.
• Finance/administration—You may want someone who can speak to

policies and regulations, as well as billing and financial operations.
• Operations—If you have specific leads who run key operational areas of
the business that are present in the scenario, consider inviting them.
• Analytics / Data Science—If your organization has dedicated data

wranglers who spend their time in the thick of quantitative information,
having them available before and during can add concrete insights.
• Senior Leadership—Last but not least, involving senior leaders early

as both sponsors and participants adds a perspective that can keep
the other participants out of the weeds. Senior leaders spend their time
thinking of the big-picture, which is what the blueprint reveals, often for
the first time. Senior leaders are critical as sponsons when gathering the
other roles, as well as helping champion the follow-through and output.
The participants in your session are the ones sharing insights into how
it’s done today, brainstorming ideas for improvement or new designs, or
suggesting proposals for directions, and making decisions for how things in
the backstage will be designed. Consider who might bring deep insights or
creative ideas to the table.
Consider the parable of the blind people and the

elephant. Each person touches a different part of the
elephant and thinks they see something different. The
reason you want many cross-functional roles in the
blueprinting session is because each role is involved in
different areas and has a different perspective.
By assembling a cross-functional team, you get

complete coverage and often for the first time gain a
shared understanding of the holistic picture of how
your business is delivering the experience.

Preparing scenarios for
blueprinting
Doing the work ahead of time to prepare specific scenarios for blueprinting
will ensure you can think ahead to who you need in the room to speak to
various aspects of the scenario, and how much you want to cover.
Current state scenario prep

• Decide what scenarios to focus on.
• Understand your current customer experience for those scenarios,

either by speaking with a subject matter expert who understands the
customer experience, or by doing some user research to speak with
customers or walk through their experience yourself.
• Hold a step definition work session with one or two subject matter
experts (who will also participate in the blueprinting workshop) to outline
the visible customer experience steps, as well as the hidden backstage
steps of each scenario. You will end up with an ordered list of steps
that you can use to input into the blueprint format. It doesn’t have to
be comprehensive, as you can continue to refine and add more steps
during the blueprinting workshop, but it’s good to have a first pass of the
step definition done before you blueprint.
• Document the touchpoints with screenshots or a live demo. If you

don’t gather screenshots or photos of your touchpoints ahead of time,
you will want to make sure to be able to simulate (if possible) the steps
in real-time in the blueprinting session (e.g. if you are going through new
customer onboarding, actually create a new customer account in the
room and screenshare as you go). This, of course, is much easier to do
with digital services, and harder to do with multi-channel services. But
if your subject matter experts don’t have a good understanding of what
happens at the steps that might not be part of their domain, having a
screenshot or doing this real-time as if you were a customer is critical to
get everyone aligned on the real experience and build empathy for the
customer.

Future state scenario prep
• Define the direction for the future-state experience. You don’t need
this fully fleshed out into great detail, but your team should be aligned on
what the service or product offering is, and how a customer might move
through the experience lifecycle to benefit from it. Know in advance at a
high level what kind of experience you want your customer to have, as
this will ground your future state blueprinting.
• Map the steps at higher level of detail, as you don’t want it so figured
out that you are inflexible about the experience. As you start to explore
feasibility and the “how” for the delivery, it may mean you need to
change some things about the experience and adapt it to work within
business constraints. You might consider an experience design work
session before blueprinting to create storyboards or a future-state
journey map. Bring this to your blueprinting session.
How much time will you need

We believe you can get from blueprinting to actionable insights in a
matter of hours. However, we understand that like any group activity, the
preparation and post-workshop activities add to the overall timeframe.
With this said, you still can make incredible progress in a very short time in
the group setting once you get the right people in the room, looking at the
right scenario.
A current-state blueprinting session can take a little as 90-120 minutes

per scenario, however if your scenarios are sufficiently complex or if you
have multiple scenarios you are trying to get through, we recommend the
following formula for scheduling sessions with your group (spaced a couple
days or no more than one week apart to keep things top of mind):
• 10 minutes for each top level step
• 15 minutes for each scenario’s opening orientation

Example: if you end up with four scenarios with 15 steps a piece, that
would budget 150 minutes, or 2.5 hours, for each scenario. Multiplied by
four, that is 10 total hours, plus 60 minutes of orientation = 11 hours total. In
workshop terms, that would be: four ~3 hour workshops, or a full-day plus a
half-day, or two 6-hour sessions (and don’t forget to include breaks).
# Scenarios Session time needed
1 ~ 2 hours (the first scenario often takes longest)
2 ~ 3.5 hours (half day workshop, or a 2hr and 1.5hr session)
3 ~ 5 hours (round up to a "full day" retreat, or split over 3 sessions)
4 ~ 6.5 hours (a "full day" retreat, or split over 3-4 sessions)
5 ~ 8 hours (suggest splitting 2 half-day workshops, or 4 sessions)
Now, some steps may go much quicker, and some may require much
longer deliberation. However, we feel safe recommending no less than 10
minutes per step to estimate the time needed. This is like building a piano
by hand; it ain’t simple, but it produces music like nothing else.
Future-state blueprinting, however, always takes

more time. We recommend you triple the time, so
Plan on having extra time
expect three 90-minute sessions to get through
for future-state because it one main scenario. The reason is that designing
takes longer to discuss and something new and deciding how it might work
decide on a new design for is a lot harder than trying to understand what is
the experience delivery. done today (a sleuthing / investigative activity vs.
a design activity).
If your scenarios have a lot of overlap, expect the first one to take more
time, and that as you layer on new “variations” of the scenario, it will go a
bit faster to just cover the unique parts of each scenario.
As a general rule, we suggest blocking one more session than you think
you need (or two). It’s better to have a hold and release it later than scram-
bling to get on people’s calendars because you weren’t able to finish in the
allotted time.

Roles for running an effective
session
You will need a few roles to help you in the session to make sure it goes
smoothly:
• Facilitator—that’s you! The blueprint facilitator keeps the process moving

and keeps the group focused on the steps and providing the needed
detail. The role is all about inquiring and listening, and guiding the
discussion.
• Notetaker—a person dedicated to capturing all the info on the

blueprinting template. Building the blueprint digitally requires someone
do it on the computer as you go and it can be difficult to capture all the
information while also facilitating, so it helps to have a separate notetaker
to assist you.
• Scenario owners—subject matter expert who has some ownership over

each scenario (for example, for a scenario covering user acquisition
and onboarding, there may be owners in your organization who are in
charge of these). This person knows the scenario and keeps the group
on target. They know enough about the “knowns and unknowns” to
prompt the group for additional information critical to the blueprint. This
is typically the project driver. The blueprinting facilitator and the scenario
owner can be the same person. However, it is very difficult to keep
the blueprint session moving forward without a subject matter expert
keeping the group on relevant areas of exploration.
These roles will really help your session go smoothly. If you can’t get all
these roles, just go a little slower to make sure you capture all the informa-
tion that comes up during the session.

Remote, hybrid, and in-person
workshop strategies
Because blueprinting is a cross-functional group activity, it is highly likely
that you will need to run it as a hybrid or remote activity as it’s difficult
(especially post-pandemic) to get people onsite in the same physical loca-
tion. Of course, this will depend on your organization and your situation.
We recommend fully remote so that everyone is on the same level playing
field during the session. You absolutely can run blueprinting in-person,
however we have a few tips for you to consider.
Facilitation Tips (regardless of remote / hybrid / in-person)

• Use a shared digital whiteboard to capture the blueprint. You may or
may not want to invite the team members to join the whiteboard and
contribute directly by adding stickies (depends on their familiarity/comfort
with the tool and your facilitation preference—you may prefer to control
the way you capture information so that it is more consistent).
• Both the facilitator and notetaker should be in the whiteboard, taking

notes and using the visual to ground the group’s discussion.
• The facilitator shares their screen of the whiteboard to anchor the group.
Fully Remote tips

• Everyone is on a level playing field, joining remotely from their laptops
• Meet using a video conference tool of choice (e.g., Zoom)
Hybrid tips (some in a room, some online)

• Hybrid is always harder (when you have some people onsite in person
in a room, and some joining remotely). However, you should facilitate it
similarly by sharing your screen as an anchor for the group discussion.
• Consider having one facilitator or notetaker physically in the room, and

one remotely to help bridge between the two groups
• Every team member should bring their laptop to see the whiteboard
• Meet using a video conference tool of choice (e.g., Zoom) to bridge

between the room and remote participants

Scenario name Pre-write out
the steps Printouts of touchpoints
Scenario 1: Name of the scenario
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
----------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------------- -----------------
------------ ------------ ------------ ------------ ------------ ------------ ------------ ------------ ------------ ------------ ------------ ------------ ------------ ------------
Color key
Supplies
Butcher paper
Painter's tape Swim lanes can help the
group more easily add or
move stickies
In-person tips (everyone in the same room)

• We still recommend using a digital whiteboard tool, as it’s a pain to move
a dozen paper stickies over in the middle of a session if you suddenly
realize you need to go back and insert a step. Additionally, typing up
and digitizing all the paper stickies later can be very time consuming and
hard to read people’s handwriting.
• However, if you really want to have a more engaging hands-on session,

you could use paper and stickies to build the blueprint. If you do this, you
will need to do a lot more prep ahead of time to ensure you have printed
physical keys to color-code the stickies for everyone, and ensure they
are using the right colors as you go. Here are some additional tips:
» Get enough colors of stickies one for each layer type, and we suggest
using the smaller stickies so you can fit more on the sheet
» Have a print-out key made with the sticky colors you have available
» Prep a butcher paper template set up
» Create a grid on your template that can fit 4 small stickies per grid unit
(swim lanes for each layer type)

» Use bigger stickies for all labels on the blueprint so they are
moveable (the layer types, and the steps)
» Print and tape the step definitions and pictures of touchpoints at the
top of your butcher paper template
» Have enough wall space and enough people space in the room to all
stand around the wall (scope this out ahead of time)
What to do if you can’t get everyone in the “room”

If you are having a hard time assembling the group, do the best you can
to get a critical mass of functional roles represented. You can ask the
attendees who are not able to make it whether they can delegate to
another team member to represent their subject matter expertise.
After the session, if you can follow up to meet with the people who did not
attend to review the blueprint with them and get their input, this is defi-
nitely possible, however it will add more time and they will not benefit from
hearing the group’s discussion. As we have shared earlier in the book, part
of the power of blueprinting is having the conversation with the group
so that they can gain shared understanding and alignment across the
end-to-end of the scenario.
This is best done in real-time, together.
Tools for blueprinting

We recommend using a virtual whiteboard tool (such as Mural) to build
the blueprint in real-time. Leverage our practical blueprinting templates
to make this easier and get started. While there are other tools you might
consider if you want to adapt the blueprinting format to work better in the
context of your organization, this activity requires quick flexibility to move
stickies around, insert columns, and more. In this section, we talk about the
various types of tools you can use for blueprinting and the benefits and
drawbacks of each.

Virtual whiteboards
We highly recommend using a virtual whiteboard to build your blueprint.
We use Mural and have several templates available to get you started on
our website (www.practicalbydesign.co).
The benefits of a virtual whiteboard:
• Accessible by remote, hybrid anywhere
• Easy to move stickies around
• Flexibility to add notes and other comments or diagrams
• The content is digitized and portable
The drawbacks of using a virtual whiteboard:
• You, as the facilitator, are in charge of structuring the data and ensuring
the integrity of the template as you build it out (e.g., people use the
correct sticky colors for each layer)
Spreadsheets
You can use a spreadsheet (like Google Sheets) to collaboratively make a
blueprint. However, it is harder to insert or export information.
The benefits of a spreadsheet:
• Accessible by remote, hybrid anywhere
• Your team may be more familiar with this tool
• The content is digitized and portable via copy/paste
• The format enforces structure and may be easier for the team to add to
The drawbacks of using a spreadsheet:
• There is a tendency to create swimlanes (one row per layer), and then
the data gets lumped together in one cell (e.g. a list of systems: “Google
Drive, Zapier”) and it is harder to have the data generated by easily
ported via copy/paste
• Less flexibility to insert rows/columns or notes

Paper (physical in-person)
Butcher paper, stickies, sharpies… If you are excited to host an in-person
retreat-style blueprinting session, the energy of the room can be invigo-
rating and it can be a fantastic activity to do hands-on. However, the reality
of our workplaces makes this more and more difficult to organize.
If you want to do a hands-on working session in-person, you will need: A

large surface (paper roll or foamcore board), printouts/stickies pre-written
with each step, different colored sticky notes for each type of layer prefer-
ably, and a color key so that people use the correct colors.
The benefits of paper in-person:
• Fun, energizing, focused in-person activity will be highly engaging
• More team members will get involved in making content on stickies and
will lead to a more energized session
• Easy for team members to participate
The drawbacks of using paper in-person:
• A wall or whiteboard can only accommodate so many people at once

before they’re shoulder-to-shoulder, which hinders coequal collaboration
• It can feel more like a one-off “teambuilding fun-time” instead of work,

which is one reason we say that blueprinting is “work, not a workshop”
• It is really hard to insert steps, columns, or rows because once you have
so many stickies down, it can be very difficult to move them
• Digitizing all the stickies after the fact can be extremely tedious and time
consuming, and hard to read people’s handwriting
• Preparing for the session requires more work on your part to pre-set up
the room.
• Subject to human fallibility and errors—people might use the wrong

colors and be harder to monitor and clean up

Boutique tailored tools
There are now several boutique tailored tools on the market (e.g.,
Custellence, Smaply) that have purpose-built blueprinting templates, as
well as templates that people have developed in many other tools (e.g.
Trello, Omnigraffle). Some of these templates follow our practical blue-
printing format, but may not have all the things you need. Some may
provide more flexibility than others to tailor your blueprint format.
You can also refer to our Mural template and adapt and build it out in a tool
of your choice (and we’d love to see what you create!).
The benefits of a boutique tailored tool:
• Purpose-built template may create time savings and is easier to fill out
because it provides specific spots to add certain information
• Purpose-built tools often have additional useful features (e.g., integration

with other apps, or ability to have it be a more “living” blueprint)
The drawbacks of a boutique tailored tool:
• Often not enough flexibility to tailor the template to fit your needs, or
match our practical format
• May or may not be harder to get information in and out of the tool
• May or may not be collaborative
• Costs and licensing

Chapter Six
Facilitating
Blueprinting
The big day has finally come! You have your cross-functional team assem-
bled, your notetaker ready, and your scenarios prepared. You have your
blueprinting template all set up and are ready to facilitate your first blue-
printing session!
For each scenario you are blueprinting, follow the steps we outline in this
section. As the facilitator, you will be the one creating the blueprint in
the template file (with your notetaker’s help), while the subject matter
experts contribute and discuss. If you have a particularly engaged team
savvy in the tool you are using, they may also jump in and add to the blue-
print directly.
95
Facilitation steps
1) Introduction to blueprinting
If this is the first time your group has met to blueprint, you will want to start
with an introduction to blueprinting and how you will collaborate using
the template and tool. Explain the roles of the facilitator, the notetaker, the
scenario owner, and the participants—the subject matter experts. Explain
what a blueprint is, the format of the blueprint, why it is valuable, and what
you will get from it. Explain the agenda and how you will collaborate to
fill out the template, and what will happen after the session. (Refer to our
template kits to get a starter intro slidedeck and facilitator script!)
2) Review the scenario to get on the same page

Review the scenario with the group, going over the high level description
ensuring everyone understands the use case. Quickly go through each of
the step definitions from start to finish so the group can hear the scenario
in its entirety. Make sure you all agree on and understand the scope of the
scenario. This is important, as some of your participants won’t have visi-
bility into certain phases of your scenario. This is a learning opportunity
for everyone in the room, and it also gives you a chance to add any steps
you missed in your prep-work, or edit the steps to more accurately reflect
what is happening. For future-state, this may stay at a higher level, as you
may not have every step detailed out yet. The goal here is to get everyone
aligned on what you have so far, and grounded for the discussion. You may
end up re-ordering, removing, changing, or adding steps here. This is fine,
that is why you’re inviting so many more eyeballs to be part of the review.
3) Start making the blueprint

Starting with the first step, going left-to-right and one step at a time, the
facilitator prompts the group to provide information for each layer. Use the
layers as a checklist to have a comprehensive conversation about that
step. Current-state example: “What roles are doing things in this step?”
or “Are there any systems being used in this step?” Future-state example:
“What roles might we need to deliver this step?” or “What systems would
we need for this step?”

4) March across the columns one at a time
Move from step to step, filling in layers, prompting the group along the way
to add their information. Use the layer types as a checklist. When there
doesn’t seem to be any pertinent information left to add, move on to the
next step definition. It is ok not to have something for every layer in each
step. It is also OK to have more than one item per layer in the same step.
5) Run through the scenario again to validate

Once the scenario has been fleshed out to a reasonable degree, go back
and read through it with the details now added to look for overlooked
information or ideas or ways to make the future-state more cohesive. For
current-state, you may take this chance to brainstorm ideas for each step
or each critical moment you identified in blueprinting. Separating ideation
from capturing the current state can be very helpful. Blueprinting will be
somewhat iterative, combing across the blueprint, you may go back and
review and adjust as you explore further steps.
6) Move on to the next scenario

When the scenario feels like it has documented the end-to-end, surface-to-
core picture, you can then move on to the next scenario until you have all
the scenarios you wanted to blueprint completed.
Get as far as you can get in a single session and pick up where you left
off the last time. If you’ve broken your scenario down into phases, try to
complete a phase before taking a break.
---- Example Blueprinting Session Agenda from www.practicalservicedesign.com ----
Get these templates and more at Project Name Blueprinting Session
practicalbydesign.co 10/25/2017
Facilitators:
Blueprinting Facilitator Cheatsheet
● Jane Doe A quick reference guide to the blueprinting terminology and format.
● John Smith
Working group participants: Scenarios exist within

different areas of your
● Sally Smith, Marketing
service. Break down a
● Jim Doe, Customer Care scenario to figure out
● Tim Smith, Product who should attend your
● Mary Doe, Operations blueprinting session.
Session Agenda:
The journey becomes a scenario… Use real data on
[10:00am] Welcome and introductions
customer journeys to
Welcome everyone and go around to introduce yourselves. inform your blueprint.
[10:05am] Introduction to goals of the workshop and blueprinting
The purpose of this blueprinting session is to map the end-to-end and surface-to-core of this particular Break your scenario into phases Step visibility
The Layers
scenario. We asked all of you here in order to create a true understanding of all aspects of this service
experience.
Introduce blueprinting using example slidedeck.
Intro to Practical Experience Blueprinting [10:15am] Overview of the scenario and steps
To make today go more smoothly, we have already prepared and defined the specific steps of the
End-to-End
scenario. That said, if as we go you believe we are missing a step, please speak up. Letʼs now review the
Practical by Design // www.practicalbydesign.co
Surface-to-Core
steps in order to make sure we are all on the same page.
[10:25am] Review layer definitions
A service blueprint is made of several layers. Now that we understand the top layer—the step
definition—letʼs look at each of the underlying layers. For each step there may be one or more (or none)
of each of these layers. [Go through each layer type with examples].
Any questions before we get started?
[10:30am] Blueprinting
www.practicalbydesign.co @erik_flowers @meganerinmiller
Facilitating Blueprinting 97
Top-to-Bottom or Left-to-Right?
When filling out the blueprint, we recommend going one step at a time
linearly through the scenario, as while it is tempting to fill out each layer
as its own swimlane all the way across (e.g. filling in all roles first, then all
processes, etc.), it leads to less cohesive understanding of the depth of
each step and the experience delivery. We find it works better to get a
complete picture at each step before moving on to the next so that the
group can build that shared understanding.
A blueprint that is half-finished but the half that was completed with all
layers (top-to-bottom) is still of value, as each completed “column” of the
surface-to-core is actionable. However, a blueprint that is half-finished, but
it’s only the few surface-level layers that are finished is of little value—if
you don’t get to the bottom of anything, then you’ve got to the bottom of
nothing.
So, trust us on this one: go one step at a time and complete the step
top-to-bottom, not one layer at a time left-to-right.

Completing a portion of the blueprint steps with all layers is more

actionable than only completing some of the layers all the way across.

Current State
Facilitation Cheat Sheet
LAYER FACILITATOR SCRIPT SUGGESTIONS
Steps “What is the key action happening that defines this step?
Is it visible or hidden?”
Touchpoints “What is the touchpoint for this step?”
Roles “What roles are participating in this step?”
Technology “What technology systems or technical infrastructure are

involved in this step?”
Policies “Are there any policies, rules, or guidelines that are in

play in this step?”
Processes “What support processes go into this step, or are

necessary for this step to happen?”
Questions “Any questions we still have about this step?”
Notes “Any additional information we want to capture here?”
Metrics “Any data or analytics to capture that might be relevant

to this step or helpful for us to know?”
Critical “What are the potential problems that can happen in this
Moments step, breakdowns in the experience or the backstage?”
Opportunities “Any ideas for how we can address those critical

moments or improve the experience at this step?”
Future State
Facilitation Cheat Sheet
Use these scripted prompts to facilitate populating the blueprint.
LAYER FACILITATOR SCRIPT SUGGESTIONS
Steps “What is the key action that defines this step? Is it visible
or hidden?”
Touchpoints “What is the touchpoint for this step?”
Roles “What roles need to participate in this step?”
Technology “What technology systems or technical infrastructure

might we need in this step?”
Policies “Do we need any policies, rules, or guidelines related to

this step?”
Processes “What support processes are necessary for this step to

happen?”
Questions “Any questions we still have about this step?”
Notes “Any additional information we want to capture here?”
Rationale “Let’s document our rationale for why we designed this

step this way.”
Potential “What are the ways this step could break down, either
Pitfalls the experience or the delivery? Let’s plan for possible
breakdowns.”
Chapter Seven
Taking
action after
blueprinting
Blueprinting results in actionable insights that help you to improve existing
experiences as well as design how new ones can be delivered. In this
section, we walk you through each of the outputs of blueprinting, and what
to do with them. This is the secret sauce that connects the dots from work-
shop to work.
103
What to do after current-state
blueprinting
After you’ve created a current-state blueprint, you will have a lot of great
information that helps to paint the picture of what is actually happening
today for that particular scenario, and you will have captured many action-
able insights (through the critical moments, opportunities/ideas, and
questions). Once you’ve got a finished blueprint, it’s time to get the action-
able insights out of the blueprint and turn them into real work for your
organization!
After blueprinting, you want separate time set aside to do a synthesis

session with the same participants that were in the blueprinting session.
Ideally, your synthesis session happens close in time to the blueprinting
session. You can do these back-to-back if you have a half day or whole day
set aside for blueprinting, or you can have a synthesis session the next day
or sometime in the next week or so. Don’t wait too long to do synthesis, but
if you have to, just block some time for review with your participants.
Doing synthesis after current-state blueprinting

After blueprinting, you will want to harvest out all the questions, critical
moments, and opportunities and start to group them into thematic areas so
that you can take action. The goal of this step is to take the crucial pieces
of information you gained through blueprinting and put them all in one
place for analysis. This is especially important if you are trying to integrate
Blueprinting
insights fromSynthesis
multiple blueprinting sessions (over more than one scenario).
1 2 3 4
Collect Group (& label) Tactical vs. Articulate

Strategic Insights
Category
Category
Category
Tactical Category
Problem Statement
Strategic
Strategic Themes
Category
Insights Spreadsheet Tactical Fixes

By collecting all the critical moments and ideas from all your related blue-
prints, you can generate more holistic insights for improvement.
Imagine you have done four blueprinting sessions on different scenarios.

You have generated dozens of critical moments and ideas. By dumping
them all together, you can start to see larger themes emerge, and begin
the process of prioritizing and weighting each insight. We suggest typing
up your critical moments and ideas into a spreadsheet. That way, you can
track the source of each, and add additional metadata such as weight,
priority, theme, or stakeholder information.
You can start to bucket your themes into two types: strategic themes vs.
tactical fixes.
Strategic Themes Tactical Fixes

• Overarching across the opportunity space • Specific, concrete action items
• Long-term changes/innovations • Immediate common-sense changes
• Requires a shared vision • Requires owners and drivers
• Tied back to principles • Tied to immediate needs/triage
• Broad thinking • Focused thinking
Strategic themes are things that might impact the overall direction of
the service, or have bigger implications for your organization. These are
possible changes you might want to make to the overall service that will
need discussion, evaluation, and leadership buy-in.
Tactical fixes are things you can just go do now that you would pass to
the specific teams in your organization to further define and prioritize that
work. These might end up directly in product backlogs, or in the hands of a
project or product manager.
The true value of blueprinting is the actionable insights generated

through capturing critical moments and ideas from your stakeholder
team. Through critical moments, you gain insight into the overall pain
present in the scenario, and through ideas, you gain insight into the oppor-
tunity to improve the experience.

Current-state blueprinting
synthesis process
1. Harvest your blueprint for actionable insights
The first step is to mine all the questions, critical moments, and opportuni-
ties/ideas from your blueprints—copy them out and put them all into one
place, either a Mural board, document, or spreadsheet.
2. Track where the stickies came from

If you have multiple blueprints, make sure you track where all the stickies
came from by adding an ID number to match which sticky came from which
blueprint.
3. Group into themes

In your synthesis session, read through each sticky out loud and start to
group like stickies or stickies that seem related. Group the stickies that are
alike and try to give the group a name. It’s OK to iterate on this process,
consolidate buckets, rename them and get to a place where you have
several unique top-level buckets emerging. (Example themes: inconsis-
tent user experience, unclear messaging to customer, promotion and
marketing, rationalize pricing, etc.)
4. Identify tactical fixes vs. strategic themes

Once you’ve identified your top themes, you are going to take a look at
each theme and break down the stickies in the theme into two catego-
ries: strategic directions and tactical fixes. Believe it or not, this is probably
where 50% of the value of the entire endeavor manifests! Doing the blue-
print is just the journey, but this is the destination.
5. Stay organized using a themes worksheet

Use our theme worksheet template to articulate the theme, or track all your
insights using a theme spreadsheet. The theme spreadsheet lets you track
each insight, the related scenario, related critical moments and ideas, and
identify the owners of the insight and who will actually be responsible for

getting that work done. This is a great way to archive the insights from your
blueprinting session and turn them into a real backlog of work.
6. Craft a problem statement for each theme

One thing that is important to craft is a problem statement around the
theme. This is your one-sentence elevator pitch of the problem. This
problem statement is an important tool for communicating what you’ve
uncovered to other stakeholders who were not present during blueprinting
or synthesis. Example: Theme: Unclear Messaging; Problem Statement:
Through our onboarding, we don’t provide clear and consistent messaging
to our end users, resulting in confusion around policies and status of
purchase.
7. Socialize and take action

Your blueprint has become an actionable backlog of problems and ideas
that need to be brainstormed, prioritized, and tested with the teams that
can implement changes. You’ll need to take the strategic, high-level
insights and discuss those with your stakeholders across your organiza-
tion. And you’ll need to help facilitate getting those tactical insights into the
correct team’s backlog.
The ideas that have emerged from your blueprint are now ready for you
to go ideate, prioritize, prototype, and test. Take the themes that have
emerged back to the teams that will be responsible for implementing them,
and brainstorm how you can solve some of the critical moments that have
emerged during blueprinting, and evaluate the ideas that arose.
Your blueprint is literally a backlog of work, and you need to use that
backlog to make an action plan with your organization. Don’t just let it sit
on a shelf—make sure you take the output of your session and move
forward to make change.
Theme Name
May 30, 2022
Problem Statement
What is the core statement that summarizes the problem?
Get these templates and more at Strategic Themes
practicalbydesign.co
What strategic themes do you see throughout your findings that can inform higher level,
longer term re-envisioning of the overall service?
Tactical Fixes
What are some tactical fixes you have found that are immediately actionable and can
improve the service without needing to wait for a strategic shift?

Current-state blueprinting
outputs and what to do with them
Steps
Use this to tell the end-to-end story and build a shared understanding of the
scenario and the experience and what is really happening.
Touchpoints
Think of this as an inventory of all touchpoints that go into an experience. Use this
to review all touchpoints in the inventory for consistency and cohesion. Work with
touchpoint owners/designers to get these to feel more connected, integrated, or
similarly designed.
Roles
Now you really know the complete picture of who is involved in the experience
delivery. Use this list to follow up with all people in those roles to build a shared
understanding of the current state and engage them in improvement efforts.
Additionally, you may have identified gaps in roles where you need to create a
new role to better support the experience. Review all roles to create a RACI and
further clarify roles and responsibilities.
Technology
Looking end-to-end at all technical systems involved in the experience delivery
can produce ideas for further simplification or integration across these systems.
Bring this to your technical teams to see what ideas they have for efficiencies or
optimization.
Policies
Now that you’ve collected all the policies at play in the scenario, you can review
to see if these policies still make sense, or whether there are any gaps to address
for your business. What of these might be barriers internally to getting things
done? Or what restrictions are limiting your customer experience?

Processes
By identifying all the support processes in your blueprint, you have created
a process inventory of the related organizational processes. Now you
might consider mapping the details of each of those support processes
if you think they are at the root cause of customer or internal pain points.
Consider process mapping each support process to identify further
improvement opportunities on the backstage. This may be beneficial to
improve cycle time, reduce delays, and improve inefficiencies.
Questions
Collect all questions you had across each scenario and use these to follow
up with relevant parties and gain further insights.
Notes
Most often, these notes just stay in the blueprint, however, you might
review them to see if there are any key action items or decisions docu-
mented there that you want to pull out of the blueprint format.
Metrics
Metrics simply inform data insights at each step and often stay in the
blueprint.
Critical Moments
Collect all critical moments and consider an ideation session where you
brainstorm ideas/solutions to address each critical moment. Then, take
all your critical moments and ideas and group them into thematic areas,
tactical and strategic. Work these into an action plan for improvement!
Opportunities
Collect all your opportunities, and group them with your critical moments
and ideas, and group them into thematic areas, tactical and strategic. Work
these into an action plan for improvement!

What to do after future-state
blueprinting
Future-state blueprinting results in a literal blueprint for how you will “build
your house” of operational delivery and organizational structures to create
the desired future-state experience. Once you’ve completed future-state
blueprinting, your job is to connect the dots between the blueprint and
how your organization will actually implement it. We do this with an imple-
mentation plan.
How to do planning after future-state blueprinting

By harvesting out each type of layer from the blueprint, you can start to
build out the next steps your organization needs to take in order to imple-
ment the design. Use our template to act on your future state blueprinting
output found at www.practicalbydesign.co.
Steps
Use this to tell the end-to-end story of how the new experience will work
and build a shared understanding of where you are heading with your
service or product offering.
Touchpoints
You now have an inventory of all touchpoints that need to get created in
order to deliver the experience. Define owners and the next steps to get
the design and development of these touchpoints going.
Roles
Create a RACI and clarify responsibilities for the roles needed to support
the new experience delivery. Work with leadership to determine whether
new roles need to get created, or how these roles will get staffed.
Technology
Now that you have a complete picture of the technical systems needed to
deliver the new experience, you can look at what already exists, or define
what needs to get developed or purchased (3rd party). Use this to inform
technical project plans and roadmaps.

Policies
Collect the list of policies that need to get defined, and determine owners
who will be responsible for further fleshing out and finalizing each policy,
ensuring that these are documented and align with the business practices.
Processes
You now have an inventory of all the support processes that you will need
to design in order to support the experience delivery. Conduct future-state
process design sessions with relevant stakeholders to start to design the
operations. Document via process maps and standard operating proce-
dures (SOPs).
Questions
Collect all open questions and triage them to get them addressed by
appropriate parties.
Notes
Most often, these notes just stay in the blueprint, however, you might
review them to see if there are any key action items or decisions docu-
mented there that you want to pull out of the blueprint format.
Rationale
Rationale can stay in the blueprint, or be pulled out to help develop a busi-
ness case for the new design if needed for socialization.
Potential Pitfalls
Copy out all potential pitfalls and group them into themes (with similar).
Brainstorm solutions if not already addressed in the blueprint design.
Discuss and work the solutions back into the blueprint. In this way, you are
doing risk mitigation and building resilience into the design of the experi-
ence delivery.

Going from workshop to work
After blueprinting, you will need to connect the dots to an action plan. We
recommend following the cultural best practices in your organization to
get work done, whether that is creating a charter, populating a backlog,
meeting with each relevant stakeholder, or creating a project plan. Find the
way that work gets done in your organization, and start connecting dots!
Essential ways you can go from workshop to work

• Socialize the output of the blueprint
Share the story of your blueprint—the problem you wanted to solve,
or the new design you wanted to realize—and build awareness and
buy-in for the organization to take action. Present a clear proposal
for improvement or implementation of the new design. Engage key
stakeholders in the organization to be advocates for taking action, and
don’t forget to get your senior leaders to champion the method and your
efforts as much as you can! Remember, the end-to-end, surface-to-core
macro view of the business is typically the things only leadership are
solely responsible for in the long run.
• Identify accountable owners to move the work forward

Find homes for the next steps, and get people to own the work. For
example, if you’ve come up with concrete tactical fixes, figure out how
to get them in the right backlogs of the right teams. If you have bigger
picture strategic directions you want to go, find a sponsor of the work to
push forward a proposal or assemble leadership to discuss the direction.
• Create a concrete implementation plan

For implementation of new designs, ensure that the work gets organized
(project management) and that each functional area is engaged to
develop a concrete implementation plan with timelines and milestones.

You may feel like some of this isn’t your role. However, as the facilitator
of blueprinting, your job is to connect the dots and help to educate your
team about the process. And yes, there may be things that aren’t officially
on your job description to do, but you can be the bridge to help move this
work forward in a new way for your organization. This is a chance for you
to be a leader, whether officially via title or not, and walk your team through
a customer-centric process to improve or design how they deliver great
experiences.
Get these templates and more at

practicalbydesign.co
✨ 6. Action plan
The goal of this section is to take your future state blueprint and turn it into an action plan. We will "harvest" the
Post-Blueprinting Action Plan
different stickies from the blueprint in order to define what you need to implement in order to realize your design.
Use this action plan template to help put your blueprinting into action! For each theme
Touchpoints Policies you uncovered in blueprinting, identify your next steps. Go to File → “Make a copy” to add
1. Identify unique touchpoints 2. Assign owners for each touchpoint
this as an editable doc to your Google Drive.
1. Identify unique policies 2. Identify policy owners and next steps
Copy all the blue stickies (touchpoints) into this area. Group duplicates into Copy the unique touchpoints here. For each, assign an owner who will lead the implementation for that
Copy all the orange stickies (policies) into this area. Group duplicates into Copy the unique policies here. For each, identify the policy owner. Summarize the next steps needed to
clusters so that you can identify all the unique touchpoints. touchpoint. Note down any next steps needed to design the touchpoints.
clusters so that you can identify the unique policies that need to get defined. define and implement the policy.
Touchpoint Owner Next steps Touchpoint Owner Next steps

Policy Owner
Theme name
Next steps Policy Owner Next steps
Problem statement goes here.

Touchpoint Owner Next steps Touchpoint Owner Next steps
Policy Owner Next steps Policy Owner Next steps
Touchpoint Owner Next steps

Policy Owner
Insight
Next steps
Who needs to be What is the next Done by
involved? step? when?
Policy Owner Next steps
Strategic insight 1
Policy Owner
Strategic insight 2
Next steps
(repeat rows as
needed)
Roles Potential pitfalls
Tactical fix 1
1. Identify unique roles 2. Define responsibilities and resourcing
1. Identify related pitfalls 2. Brainstorm solutions for pitfalls
Copy all the green stickies (roles) into this area. Group duplicates into clusters Copy the unique roles here. For each, describe the key responsibilities of the role. Think about how it might
so that you can identify the unique roles needed to deliver the experience. get resourced. Copy all the red stickies (pitfalls) into this area. Group similar pitfalls into
clusters so that you can brainstorm solutions (if not already addressed in the the blueprint design.
Tactical fix 2
Copy the pitfall categories here. For each, brainstorm some solutions. Discuss and work solutions back into
blueprint design).
Role Description Resourcing Role Description Resourcing
Pitfall category (repeat rows as
Pitfall category
needed)
Ideas Ideas Ideas Ideas
Role Description Resourcing Role Description Resourcing
Role Description Resourcing

Pitfall category
Theme name Pitfall category
Ideas Ideas Ideas Ideas
Problem statement goes here.

Insight Who needs to be What is the next Done by

involved? step? when?
Processes Questions Strategic insight 1
1. Identify unique processes 2. Identify process owners and next steps 1. Identify related questions 2. Identify a person to answer the questions
Copy all the pink stickies (processes) into this area. Group duplicates into Copy the unique policies here. For each, identify who will own the process. Note any next steps needed to
Strategic insight 2
clusters so that you can identify the unique processes that need to be designed. design each process. Copy all the purple stickies (questions) into this area. Group related questions Copy the question groups here. For each, identify who will seek answers. Write down any next steps to
into clusters so that you can identify a point person to answer them. answer the questions.
Process Owner Next steps Process Owner Next steps

(repeat rows as
Question group Owner
needed)
Next steps Question group Owner Next steps
Process Owner Next steps Process Owner Next steps

Question group Owner Tactical fix 1
Next steps Question group Owner Next steps
Process Owner Next steps

Question group Owner Next steps


Systems General planning
1. Identify unique systems 2. Identify system owners and next steps 1. Brainstorm next steps for implementation 2. Identify owners to move the work forward
Now take a step back and think about your design at a high level. What needs List your key next steps here. Assign an owner to move the work forward.
Copy all the gray stickies (systems) into this area. Group duplicates into clusters Copy the unique systems here. For each, identify the system owner. Describe the next steps needed to
to be done in order to move the work forward? Do you need to get stakeholder
so that you can identify the unique systems. implement any changes to support the new experience.
buy-in? Do you want to design and test a pilot prototype? Do you want to do
more user research? Think together as a group about what needs to be done.
Next step Owner
System Owner Next steps System Owner Next steps
Next step Owner

System Owner Next steps System Owner Next steps
System Owner Next steps Next step Owner
Next step Owner

System Owner Next steps
Next step Owner

System Owner Next steps
Chapter Eight
Common
blueprinting
questions
Over the years, as we’ve taught blueprinting to thousands of people
around the globe and supported the community in using blueprinting in
their real work contexts, we’ve encountered many recurring questions.
Here’s a collection of some of the ones we feel are most important for you
to get clarity on!
115
Is blueprinting just applied
service design?
No. However, blueprinting is a great entry point for thinking more about
designing great services, as it is an easy tool for the business to start to
think and act in a customer-centric way.
Service Design is a design discipline that applies design thinking and

human-centered design principles to services. Service Design is a broader
umbrella that focuses on service experiences and the
Blueprinting is a core complexity that goes into service delivery. In this way,
method of service design. it has a lot of overlap with design research, experi-
ence design, and business design.
Blueprinting is a core method in service design, as it is the primary way

to connect the front and the backstage—an essential aspect of designing
great service experiences. There are many other methods, however, that a
service designer might use to assess service experiences, develop service
strategy, designs, and delivery.
Why “Practical” Blueprinting

(vs. traditional service
blueprinting)?
When we created the practical blueprint format in 2015, we were trying to
find more practical, actionable ways to do service design in a real work
context. The “traditional” service blueprint format leverages swim lanes
and arrows that in the reality of an actual workshop
Practical blueprinting session were almost impossible to map in real-time

with stakeholders. We tried and failed to leverage
focuses on making it as
this mapping format in real work contexts and it was
easy as possible to make disappointing, frustrating, and we knew there was a
the blueprint in real-time better way to unlock the benefits of blueprinting in
with stakeholders. real time.

We iterated and tried different things until we landed on the practical blue-
printing format, with which we found great success in our workplaces. Our
blueprinting format emphasizes making the actual process of blueprinting
more practical and optimizes the experience for participants and facili-
tator alike. We have made this as efficient, effective, and highly action-
able of a process as possible, and the format and method have been
tried and tested across industries and around the world by thousands of
practitioners.
If you find ways to improve upon our approach, we’d love to hear from you.
We encourage you to adapt the method to best fit your work context, and
“get practical” with us!
Why did you rename the

service blueprint?
“Service” is a narrow word to define what is really a broad system of how
the organization delivers. There are many organizations that are “product”
orgs that can benefit from blueprinting, and also situations where the term
“service” may not apply. You could blueprint the expe-
rience a penguin has in a zoo. Or the experience of a
holiday party. Or the experience of an astronaut flying
Anything that requires a
to Mars. Would you call those services? Probably not. complex organizational
But they are definitely experiences that occur over time, delivery and results
and require a complex organizational delivery in order to in an “experience” for
make them successful or good.
someone (or something)
We wanted to use a more general and accurate name for can be blueprinted.
the method, and believe it should be called an “experi-
ence delivery blueprint,” as the blueprint itself is a visual
representation of how the organization is delivering the experience, and
looks through the lens of the scenario for a particular experience in order
to unpack that operational delivery in the backstage. In short, we refer to it
as an “experience blueprint.”

How many scenarios do I really
need?
As we describe in chapter three, you do not need to blueprint every single
possible scenario. Let’s use the theme park metaphor to understand this.
Imagine a theme park with many different rides. Each ride is like a touch-
point in your experience ecosystem. You can imagine how different visitors
each have their own unique experience of the theme park, but many of
their trips share a lot of the same touchpoints. You likely have popular rides
that the majority of visitors experience in their visit, and then you probably
have edge cases that are less popular.
If you pick a few of the majority scenarios, they will likely cover the popular
rides and a bit more. Then, if you pick a couple edge case scenarios, you
will get a view into the less common experiences. To get the coverage of
80% of the park, you only need a handful of scenarios. So, think of a bell
curve where the majority of your customer experiences fall in the middle
68%—pick a few scenarios that cover the majority, and then pick a couple
edge cases to help round it out.

Can I use the blueprint if I am a
UX or product designer?
Yes, the Practical Blueprint, both current- and future-state, are excellent
tools for UX and product designers, or really anyone who has a hand in
seeing the end-to-end, surface-to-core view of what the blueprint is meant
to visualize and represent.
As a UX or product designer, you might want to bring out your blueprinting

toolkit when you are sensing that the organization is struggling to oper-
ationalize the delivery of a design effectively or efficiently. It can also be
a great tool for you to present your design concept in a way that shows
you understand (or want to better understand) how the design relies on
backstage organizational delivery, and that you (designer) want to have a
constructive, collaborative conversation with your business counterparts in
order to produce an even better holistic experience delivery.
A note to the UX and Product Designers

If you consider yourself in a role that would be more easily described as
UX or Product Design, all the tenets and practices of both current and
future-state blueprinting apply to your work! You may not feel like you have
that strategic seat at the table… in fact, you may feel like you’re sitting at
the kid’s table while all the adults have dinner without you!
Fear not: both of us authors spent a great many years in UX and Product
design, and most of the biggest wins, learnings, and evolution of our own
careers happened before we made any sort of switch away from primarily
focusing on UX and Product Design. In fact, learning to use these blue-
printing methods, how to facilitate, how to synthesize, and how to socialize
the output is what elevated our careers more than anything else.
Take what is in this book and apply it to your UX and Product Design proj-
ects. We’ve applied both current and future-state blueprinting to things
that may feel small, but are deceptively complex. From digital product
onboarding, to customer account management and support, to first-time
use experiences, and even search and browse experiences, the principles
all apply just the same.

Remember, it’s not the scope of the project that makes blueprinting effec-
tive, it’s the proper scoping of the scenario and the efficacy of your blue-
printing process. You’ll never be told you lack an understanding of how
your design connects to the business after doing this! So go forth and blue-
print, UXers!
Can I use the blueprint if I am

(insert your role here)?
If you’re asking, the answer is yes.
Let us set the record straight: the blueprint format we’ve evolved is
good for ANYONE in any position. If you see the potential value of blue-
printing as addressing the gaps in your organization’s understanding and
cross-functional collaboration, you can organize and facilitate a blueprinting
effort. You don’t have to be a designer, or a service designer, or even in a
position of great authority in your organization to do blueprinting.
While the original audience was product and service designers, since
publishing the first materials in 2015, we’ve had people use our practical
blueprinting format in positions that have nothing to do with the traditional
scope of “design and product.” The method and format has been used
by people in organizations such as mortgage operations for banks, logis-
tics for hospital procedures, government agency applications at state and
federal levels, non-profits… the list goes on.
Most of these people had no connection to the typical path that leads one
to “design thinking” and the typical methods of product innovation that
Silicon Valley has made so mainstream. The only thing they all share in
common—us and you and everyone—is the ability to take a step back and
look at the macro view and realize that tackling complex systems requires
a better tool, and that’s what the Practical Experience Blueprint is.

Making a blueprint a living
document
Some teams want to make their blueprint a living document, and this may
be more possible using dynamic tools—like purpose-built boutique tools
made for the format, or tools that have integrations between data in the
blueprint and other common tools used in the workplace for communica-
tion or collaboration.
However, you should note that a current-state blue-

print is a snapshot of a point in time. It will go out of A current-state blueprint
date as the experience and business change natu-
is a point-in-time snapshot
rally over time and as you implement improvements
uncovered during blueprinting. You can at future
of the organization.
points review and refresh the current-state map,
however, the point of the map is to identify things to fix and move toward
fixing those things that will then make your map out of date. So, it may not
be realistic to expect that a current-state map stays accurate as it’s really
a vehicle for getting to an improved experience delivery. You would need
rigorous team processes and roles to ensure that maps are kept up-to-
date, and an owner in charge of this as well as a team culture and values to
reinforce the value of keeping it up-to-date.
Now, a future-state blueprint is a map of what to build. When you start to

build it, however, the design is likely to change. It may be useful then to
make sure someone owns the responsibility to ensure that changes get
fed back into the blueprint so that it accurately reflects the decisions that
have been made—think of this as a project manager role or an implemen-
tation owner role. This might be you!

Are there other ways to modify
the blueprint format?
Sometimes the practical blueprinting format and method may not be
the most “practical” for your particular work context. We have ourselves
adapted our own methodology to better fit a unique project or team’s
needs.
Sometimes it can be helpful to separate the blueprint into swimlanes again

(vs. stacking the layers underneath the step). While you lose the “heat
map” benefit of the map, sometimes this helps keep the team more orga-
nized, and can help team members to participate more actively in adding
stickies themselves (vs. you or the notetaker capturing the information
into the blueprint format). If doing an in-person, paper-driven blueprint, the
swimlanes actually can help to hold space for multiple stickies in each step
so that you don’t have to keep moving the stickies down or over.
Phases
The Scenario

Steps
Step
Touchpoint
Usually there is only one
touchpoint per step, so
you can leave this as is.
Roles
Layers in swimlanes can

Technology be easier if doing physical
blueprinting (so you don't
have to move stickies
around if you want to add
more layers), and can also
Policy
make it easier for group
members to go head's-
down in the digital
whiteboard to add
etc. ...
stickies themselves.
Sometimes, if your team needs to stay focused at a higher level about a

particular experience, you can adapt the format to focus more at the phase
level to begin to unpack the backstage and brainstorm opportunities. This
can be a more simple and helpful format to use if you only have a short
time and a lot to cover, and many stakeholders to engage in a real-time
workshop setting. We suggest in this situation to go one phase at a time,

and have your participants go heads down to add stickies to each swim-
lane in that phase, take a few minutes to review each, and then move to
the next phase. In this way, you can capture a lot of data very quickly with
a large group. You will, however, have to do cleanup later to group and pull
out unique items, and may want to spend time following up with key stake-
holder to map the layers’ data to the step (if you need that detail). However,
you can get almost a similar benefit doing it at this level without mapping to
the unique step in some cases.
Phase one Phase two Phase three
Step
Touchpoint
Roles Capturing the layers by

phase can be easier if
you are trying to get a
larger group to add their
Technology
info to the blueprint in a
workshop setting. You will
have to do some clean up
and a second pass to
Policy map the layers to steps if
you need that level of
detail.
etc. ...
To simplify the blueprint, but still get effective output, just focus on the core component layers (touchpoint,
technology, roles, policies, processes), and then add critical moments and opportunities (current-state)
or potential pitfalls (future-state).
What you might lose in this adaptation of the method is the actual
end-to-end understanding of the steps of the scenario, and the particular
details of the backstage. You will capture general, high level insights about
roles, systems, processes, policies, and opportunities for improvement, but
you might miss some of the nuance and tactical fixes.

Is a blueprint a pretty map I
can show to stakeholders?
Not really. Yes, it is a map, but it is more functional than pretty, and the time
you spend to make it pretty may not be worth it. However, it is a map that
contains a lot of information that can be pulled out and visualized in other
ways. Think of it as a source of truth for detailed information that can be
referenced.
Always remember: the blueprint is a process for how to get to the ultimate
destination—action! A blueprint’s core purpose is to let you tease out the
opportunities, critical moments, and ideas, but it is none of those things
itself! Like the scaffolding used to build the Eiffel Tower, once you’re done
building, remove it and let the monument to your work live on. For you, the
Eiffel Tower is the output of your synthesis—the action plan.
Functionally, the visual can act like a heat map, especially for current-state,
where you can visually see and spot at a high level where the more compli-
cated or heavy areas are. This can have a great impact on stakeholders as
you are reviewing the outputs of blueprinting.
Think about your narrative and what you are trying to share, convince, or
educate your stakeholders about, and then adapt the information from the
blueprint to the format that will be most useful for doing that.
See the interlude chapter of photos and screenshots of real-world blue-

prints to see the breadth of how final products can look! Don’t be afraid to
adapt the format to your needs!

How do I get my organization
to let me blueprint?
Blueprinting is a tool that takes the macro into account and exposes it like
never before. This is good, since it gives you a massive amount of insight
into your organization, crossing silos, teams, channels, and touchpoints.
However, this introduces a factor that typically isn’t as relevant with most
innovation and design frameworks: the required amount of air-cover and
champions at the top. One of the biggest considerations on how much
impact and success a blueprinting effort can have is directly proportional
to the level and depth of executive sponsorship. The insights, breakdowns,
or new designs that the blueprint—both current and future-state—reveals
are almost never simple, and almost never localized. The enduring solu-
tions are often on a macro scale and need the support of top-down leader-
ship to influence the various silo, team, or touchpoint owners that typically
operate within their own sandboxes.
The blueprint doesn’t just codify and externalize the end-to-end, surface-
to-core of a single area. If you look at a typical blueprint and the internal
teams and owners it crosses, often you’ll find that the only common owner
of the entire thing are at the business-unit or VP level, or if the blueprint is
scoped small enough, Director level.
This means that gaining the blessing, approval, and support of the leaders
who have a stake in the macro view is essential. They have a unique
ownership, and accountability, for things that cross silos, teams, touch-
points, in ways that the individual focus of the teams themself do not.
If you need a metaphor, it’s like a bunch of city mayors trying to create an
interstate freeway system. All the good intent and due-diligence of plan-
ning this freeway system won’t get far if those city mayors don’t have the
support of the state governors or federal representatives. Even if those
city mayors are going to do all the work coordinating and connecting their
cities, they MUST have that support from the top.
Which invites the question: why don’t more of these leaders at the top
require and request blueprints? After reading this book, they will!
Conclusion
Blueprinting is one of the fastest, most effective ways to be customer-cen-
tric and look through the lens of the experience into the nuts and bolts of
your organization and how it delivers (or might deliver). By narrowing in
on your most critical scenarios, blueprinting allows you to see end-to-end
and surface-to-core. This enables you to collect valuable insights across
multiple scenarios and identify strategic themes and tactical fixes, or design
a brand new way to deliver an experience. It lets you take meaningful,
durable action, transforming your customer’s experience!
There are many journeys and many customers, but there’s only one of
your business, only one collection of systems, policies, processes, and
actors that make up what you offer. That is what the blueprint uncovers;
the backstage that is used over and over again by the customers. We map
customer experiences all the time, but rarely do we take the time to map
out and document our own businesses.
Conclusion 127
An experience is only as cohesive as the teams that produce it, and any
attempt to make meaningful changes to an experience requires a deep
understanding of the makeup of the organization that builds the stage for
that experience.
You now have everything you need to go through a practical blueprinting

project lifecycle, from figuring out what to blueprint, all the way to finding
strategic themes and implementing tactical fixes or creating an actionable
implementation plan for your new design. The practical blueprint lets you
rally your peers around an opportunity space, diagnose tough problems,
understand and see the truly holistic view, and take meaningful action.
Blueprinting can give you actionable insights that influence the strategic
direction of your organization, as well as the day-to-day small stuff. But it
takes your passion for a more holistic front and backstage mindset to culti-
vate lasting change in the way your organization approaches designing
experiences.
We hope you’re able to take what you’ve learned from this guide and apply
it to your own organization. Please get in touch, and let us know how it
went! We are so excited to hear from you and learn about how you are
using this practical approach to blueprinting!
Visit www.practicalbydesign.co to download templates, take our current

and future-state blueprinting online courses, and stay connected as we
continue to make design, strategy, and innovation methods more practical,
by design.
Happy blueprinting!
—Megan & Erik

Leave us a review!
If you liked the book, the best way to show us is with a review on
Amazon and Goodreads!
The easiest way to do this is to go to:
pbd.pub/reviews
and you’ll find links to the Amazon product page, and our entry on
Goodreads, as well as a link you can share on social media to help
other people find the book!
Conclusion 129
Glossary
Key terms
Actor
The word “actor” is often used in service design to refer to the staff roles
(backstage people) who are involved in service delivery. These roles are
“performing” service for the customer, and are thus often referred to as
“actors.”
Channel
A specific medium in which interactions take place, such as: physical mailer,
email, social media, phone, web.
End-to-End
The breadth across time of a scenario, showing the start all the way to the
end of the scenario and everything that takes place in between. The lens
through which you view the backstage.
Experience
The story through time of what a customer (or other end recipient or user)
goes through when traversing a service or product offering.
Experience Lifecycle
A standard set of phases that all experiences go through, including:
unaware → aware → contract/buy → first time use → normal use → reconsider
→ leave. This lifecycle can be genericized and applied to all experiences of
a service or product offering.
Glossary 131
Map
A visual diagram representation of information. Mapping is a way to make
visual the evidence, and externalize information so that a group of stake-
holders can build shared understanding and anchor in a shared mental
model.
Product
A static product that is acquired by a customer to be used to meet a
customer need (e.g. a hammer, a version of software).
Scenario
A linear use case that plays out over time that involves your customer’s
experience (“visible” steps) combined with your organization’s backstage
(“hidden” steps).
Service
A specific offering that your organization produces that acts in service to
the customer. Services provide or perform, and engage the customer in a
relationship over time. The service comprises all the people, processes,
systems, policies, and touchpoints that cross the experience lifecycle.
Surface-to-Core
The depth of underlying support roles, touchpoints, systems, processes,
and policies that create the end-to-end surface.
Touchpoint
A point of interaction between the customer and the business. A touch-
point exists in a channel, and is often a “product” that is designed. Example
touchpoints: webpage, app, phone conversation, help ticket, billing state-
ment, email, physical store, flyer, advertisement.

Methods
Blueprint
A blueprint is a map that exposes the detailed components of how an
experience is delivered—the people, processes, systems, policies, and
touchpoints that set the stage for the customer experience.
Flow Chart
A flow chart is often used to map an experience path including the various
branching as a customer navigates the touchpoints of an experience. Task
flows are often at a bit more of a detailed level than the steps of a blue-
print, and do not cover any of the backstage of blueprinting or even the
emotional aspects covered in journey mapping.
Journey Map
A journey map is an iconic or representative map of a linear customer
experience as a journey showing how they experience your business. This
only shows the customer point of view, and doesn’t go into the backstage
of the business or how it delivers or hidden steps. A journey map covers
the doing, thinking, feeling and touchpoints of a customer experience.
Process Map
A process map is a flow chart showing end to end of a business process
(not customer centric) and shows the branches and variations, identifying
operators, systems, and other process data. A blueprint may overlap with
some steps of a process map, however, we blueprint a unique concrete
scenario end-to-end, and stay customer-centric and do not look at all the
branches, variations, and data of a process. Instead, blueprinting will result
in the start of a process inventory of sorts—identifying a set of processes
that are essential to the experience.
Glossary 133
About the Authors
We (Erik and Megan!) have over 40 years experience in combined lead-
ership in design, innovation, and product strategy. We have worked for
large enterprises, small startups, and consulted with companies across the
Global 2000. Our onlines courses, articles, templates, and learning content
have been viewed and used by hundreds of thousands, across every busi-
ness sector and level of government worldwide!
Read more and connect with us, we’re always looking for new people and
organizations to collaborate with and support!
Visit https://www.practicalbydesign.co/about-us to learn more and

contact us today!
Megan Erin Miller Erik Flowers
With over 15 years of design and Erik is a 24 year veteran of working

leadership experience, Megan prac- with technology and design to make
tices and leads teams in a rigorous, new, novel and interesting things.
data and empathy-driven design Creative productivity with like-
practice. She is passionate about minded people is his obsession;
talent development, and chases her he is driven to engage, entertain,
purpose to connect, inspire, ignite, and educate people with works of
and empower others. meaning and merit.

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Your Guide to

Blueprinting by Erik Flowers &

YOUR GUIDE TO BLUEPRINTING THE PRACTICAL WAY

by Erik Flowers and Megan Erin Miller

First Edition © 2022 by Practical by Design. All rights reserved.

Cover design and interior artwork by Megan Erin Miller

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted

—Chief Service Officer, Information Technology Consulting —Partner, Law Firm

The Practical Blueprint helped me enormously to design better —Course Taker

Current-state vs. future-state blueprinting 27

The format of a blueprint 39

The process of blueprinting 71

Planning and preparation 79

Taking action after blueprinting 103

Common blueprinting questions 115

This new and significantly expanded guide to blueprinting contains

— Megan & Erik

We focus on practical methods that make it easier to do design, innovation,

More help is available!

This is why we created our online learning project,

• What a current state blueprint is • How to plan out your service

Coming soon: Future-State Experience Blueprinting

Due out Late 2022, early 2023! It’s a big one!

Discount code For 20% off courses and

We need new tools to become more nimble and embed human-centric

What’s unique to blueprinting as a methodology (vs. process mapping or

The intent is to stay customer-centric, but paradoxically, the blueprint

12 Your Guide to Blueprinting the Practical Way

Blueprinting is a tool that—unlike process mapping, journey mapping,

Imagine that your customers’ experiences are like a patient complaining

What you get from experience blueprinting

• Current State Blueprinting for improving existing experiences: actionable

• Future State Blueprinting for newly envisioned experiences: an actionable

The value of blueprinting

We believe blueprinting is one of the best ways to inspire your organiza-

Blueprinting is especially effective when you are dealing with “wicked”

14 Your Guide to Blueprinting the Practical Way

The lens of the experience

The experience viewed through this lens could be thought of as a tradi-

Current State Blueprinting

Future State Blueprinting

16 Your Guide to Blueprinting the Practical Way

What you can blueprint

Different kinds of experiences you can blueprint

• Employee experiences and other internal support within an organization

• “Mandatory” experiences—like government, compliance driven processes

• Events, conferences, workshops, trainings or other live programs

The primary use for blueprinting that we are focusing on is in an organiza-

Frontstage and backstage

Blueprinting focuses on looking through the frontstage as a viewport into

The frontstage is used to describe everything that the customer experiences

The literal metaphor is helpful here. If you imagine a simple stage in a

Additionally, just as the customer has a “outside of the theater” life—a

18 Your Guide to Blueprinting the Practical Way

By connecting blueprinting into your existing orga-

between the frontstage stage. For example, as an input to blueprinting,

Similarly, as an output of blueprinting, you will want to leverage other

The blueprint is the visualization of your scenario or system’s spinal

20 Your Guide to Blueprinting the Practical Way

Blueprinting vs. Journey

Journey mapping helps tell the story of what a

Beyond capturing the current experience your customers are going

Typically, a journey map is not a depiction of an actual real-world, single