AutodeskEnterprise-wide CX transformation.
One experience. One organization moving together.
Autodesk serves customers across a complex ecosystem of products, services, and digital touchpoints. Yet customers often encountered fragmented experiences as they discovered solutions, evaluated products, purchased subscriptions, and managed their accounts.
The opportunity was bigger than redesigning individual interactions. It required a shared vision for the entire customer journey — and a new way for teams across the organization to work together to deliver it.
Led during Gene Lee's tenure as VP of Design at Autodesk, in collaboration with cross-functional teams. Work predates MAP.
North Star concept designs aligned internal teams around one shared vision for the end-to-end customer experience.
The challenge
Customers see one Autodesk. The organization saw departments.
A customer's relationship with Autodesk spans marketing, sales, purchasing, onboarding, product usage, subscription management, and support.
Internally, these experiences crossed numerous teams, systems, and business processes. While individual teams focused on their responsibilities, customers experienced the entire journey as one relationship.
The challenge was to move beyond optimizing individual touchpoints and establish a more connected experience around customer needs.
The end-to-end customer lifecycle — one seamless digital experience across marketing, sales, and customer success.
The approach
See the whole journey before fixing the pieces.
We brought teams together to examine the customer experience across organizational boundaries. Through journey mapping, service design, and collaborative workshops, we connected customer needs with digital touchpoints, operational processes, and business priorities.
The work revealed opportunities that could not be addressed by any single department working alone.
3 workshops conducted, producing over 100 unified high-level requirements across several departments — translating customer and business needs into prioritized development workstreams.
3 workshops conducted, producing over 100 unified high-level requirements across several departments.
A shared vision
A creative platform designed for every customer.
“A unified and personalized creative platform that helps teams discover, maximize, and learn from the products, community, and insights every customer needs to thrive.”
The North Star established a common direction for the customer lifecycle, connecting product discovery, trials, onboarding, administration, learning, and ongoing value. The vision was guided by three experience principles.
Seamless
Remove unnecessary complexity across the customer journey.
Empathetic
Design experiences that recognize customers' individual needs.
Effortless
Help customers achieve outcomes with less work.
The strategy framing that aligned leadership: why it matters, how to deliver it, and what it produces.
A connected experience
Bringing the vision to life.
Interactive North Star concepts made the connected customer journey tangible. Discovery organized Autodesk's portfolio around industry needs, relevant products, and customer workflows — helping people find the right solution and navigate complex choices with greater clarity.
Get started
From exploration to action, with less friction.
The North Star explored a more progressive path from product evaluation to trial and purchase, helping customers begin quickly, understand next steps, and make informed decisions.
Prototype footage — the guided path from evaluation to an active trial.
Grow
An experience that keeps delivering value.
The post-purchase vision explored personalized dashboards, streamlined administration, automation, project visibility, and actionable insights — shifting the experience from managing software toward helping customers achieve their goals.
Prototype footage — the personalized dashboard connecting projects, goals, and insights.
These are North Star vision concepts created to align the organization around a direction — a shared future-state vision.
Beyond the interface
Transforming the experience meant changing how teams worked.
A seamless customer experience cannot be delivered through disconnected teams.
Alongside the future-state design work, the initiative focused on building alignment across marketing, sales, customer success, product, technology, design, and operational functions.
By bringing the complete journey into view, teams could establish a shared understanding of customer needs, surface dependencies, and connect experience priorities across organizational boundaries.
The work connected customer experience strategy with cross-functional collaboration and the organizational changes needed to support it.
Journey-level analysis turned into concrete, shared opportunities — visible to every team that touched the experience.
The outcome
One vision. Shared direction.
The initiative aligned leadership around a shared North Star for Autodesk's digital customer experience.
It established a common framework for understanding the customer lifecycle and demonstrated how more seamless, personalized experiences could connect customer needs with business priorities.
The broader lesson was that customer experience transformation requires more than better interfaces. It requires organizations to see the whole journey — and work together to improve it.
Shared vision
A common direction for the end-to-end customer experience
Connected perspective
A fuller view of customer needs across departments and touchpoints
Future-state concepts
Interactive North Star explorations that made the experience direction tangible
Better experiences begin with a shared vision.
The Autodesk work illustrates how experience strategy can connect people, processes, and technology around the needs of customers — and create a clearer direction for organizational change.
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