What is an Experience Ecosystem?

An experience ecosystem is the environment containing the rules and characteristics of the core competencies, influencers, and stakeholders that make up a business or business function.

When read, in whatever form that takes, it is generally described and understood from the perspective of an agent within the ecosystem. When portrayed, it is generally presented in the form of a map or web that, due to its number of characters and relationships, is highly sensitive to line weight, size, color, and proximity to help communicate the dynamics among all of its elements. Even more than Journey or Experience sequences, Experience Ecosystems are very much expressions of a living set of relationships, each with their own scope, cadence, and intent.

As they are of such large scope, it is generally helpful to describe relationships and dynamics with analogies that can illustrate function more simply and allow the mapping of ecosystems to be a proscriptive tool in addition to a complete assessment of what exists in the environment of a product or company. Experience Ecosystems are tapped into by many different agents of a business and can be use for everything from the determination the efficacy of a business’ constituent parts to understanding how the consumer interfaces with one company and its competitors. In processing these very different sets of co-existing information, it is possible to completely ignore others when understanding discrete sections of the most pertinent elements of the ecosystem to any one agent. This is largely why it’s rare to see the complete mapping or even a full cross-section of an ecosystem map and instead see mapping exercises that are more specific to the individual organs of a business.