CX Mental Models & Frameworks · Strategic Assessment
PSE Customer Overlap
Draw two circles — what you build and what customers need — and face how little they overlap.
The PSE-Customer Overlap is a visual reality check: one circle for your products, services, and experiences, one for actual customer tasks and needs. The gap between them is your experience debt. Deep overlap is where real innovation lives.
Organizations built around product lines rarely ask whether what they ship matches what customers are trying to do. This visualization makes the misalignment impossible to ignore. Gaps between the circles are experience debt — known places where the offering fails to solve a customer problem. Separate circles mean the company is shooting in the dark, obsessed with quantitative data instead of users.
Use it as a collaborative exercise during a discovery phase or strategic planning session. Its value is the conversation it forces: past superficial metrics like time on site, to the harder question — does what we build actually help the customer experience success?
Apply this
Reading about pse customer overlap is one thing. Seeing where it applies in your journey is the useful part.