We've normalised 'tech debt' and 'design debt,' but the cost quietly undermining most organisations is more insidious: experience debt, the accumulated friction, inconsistency, and frustration customers carry across every interaction, policy, and service gap. It compounds like interest, eroding trust while teams celebrate feature releases that unintentionally make things worse. Most of it hides in one blind spot: the gap between how the business thinks the experience works and how customers actually live it. Leadership sees the roadmap and the launch notes; customers feel the seams between teams, systems, and decisions. This session gives you a way to see and close that gap.
Keirice will unpack how siloed decision-making, reactive shipping, disconnected service flows, and poorly integrated AI accelerate this debt, and why teams rarely see it coming. You'll then apply a Framework directly to your own organisation as an enterprise alignment tool: a shared lens that puts business perception and customer reality side by side and makes the gap between them impossible to ignore.
If craft is our antidote to mediocrity, managing experience debt is our antidote to chaos.
What you'll learn and do
Detect the debt you can't currently see. Develop a shared language and lens for spotting experience debt where it hides: in the gaps between interactions, teams, and decisions.
Expose the perception gap with our framework. Use the framework as an enterprise alignment tool to map business perception against customer reality, so you can address root causes rather than symptoms.
Quantify and prioritise with the Experience Debt Calculator. Score your debt so you can highlight the risk to senior leadership to address Experience Debt rather than losing out to another bolted-on product or feature at planning time.
Build a paydown plan. Leave with a prioritised shortlist and the framing to make the case for it with your stakeholders.
Who should attend
This session is for leaders, designers, and product people who are:
Shipping quickly but sensing quality and coherence quietly erode
Accountable for customer experience or product outcomes that span multiple teams or silos
Trying to make the case upward that invisible friction carries a real cost and risk to your business
Integrating AI into their products and worried about keeping the experience coherent
What you'll walk away with
A shared vocabulary for naming and discussing experience debt with your team
Your own organisation's experience debt mapped against our framework, with the gap between business perception and customer reality surfaced during the session
A prioritised shortlist, scored with the Experience Debt Calculator, of what to address first
The language and framing to pitch experience-debt work to leadership
