This is the aggregation page for my recent writing about Experience Stacks.
Each piece can stand alone: readers do not have the homework assignment of going back to read a bunch of earlier posts in order to understand the latest one. However, for those who are interested, this page collects and summarizes the lot.
Brief Definition: an Experience Stack is the customer-facing counterpart to a company’s Tech Stack. A Tech Stack is the combo-platter of software and hardware that a company uses to create, manage, and track its products. An Experience Stack is the combo-platter of all the activities customers do over time with and around the things companies make. Customers improvisationally shift from context to context during any given experience, which is one of the key differences between analog (human) thinking and algorithmic (AI) thinking. It is easiest to see Experience Stacks with narrative products like movies and television, but customers generate Experience Stacks with all products.
Newsletter Issues that discuss Experience Stacks in reverse chronological order:
Experience Stacks and Travel Back (October 6, 2024)
Returning to places you’ve been can reactivate old contexts and relationships in a special way. (Issue #136)
Time Travel, Analog and Digital (March 31, 2024)
There are qualitative differences between analog and digital experiences. Digital experiences are frictionless, engaging mostly sight and sound. Analog experiences have a lot of friction and engage all our senses, including smell and taste, which have always surprising power to send us falling backwards in time (like Proust and that cookie). [Note, this piece is not overtly about Experience Stacks, but it’s within the same territory.]
Jokes, Puns, Politics, and Other Nonsense (March 10, 2024)
The reason we groan at puns is that puns cheat: you think that there will be a logical, narrative resolution, but at the last moment the context changes from sense to nonsense. Here, the pivot is from the meaning of words to homophones (when two words have the same sounds like y and why) or from one word or phrase meaning to another (dough as the stuff you bake with versus dough as slang for money).
Walmart, Vizio, Amazon, and Experience Stacks (February 18, 2024)
Experience Stacks are present focused: they are about creating a complicated, robust, and difficult-to-compare experience that helps a business keep a customer.
We all live in the present, but it’s hard to talk about the present because each present moment instantly vanishes into the past. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed that you can’t step into the same river twice because both you and the river are different each time.
Experience Stacks and Matthew Perry (R.I.P.) (February 4, 2024)
Experience Stacks do not suffer from the tyranny of sequence: they can be non-linear. This is another key distinction between Experience Stacks and fandoms; watching or reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows before you read or watch any of the other stories is an inferior experience to reading the Potter stories in order. That is not true of Experience Stacks.
The Monster in My Ear (July 8, 2023)
When we work to create memorable experiences, we typically focus on the first ingredient (the experience itself). After the isolation of COVID lockdown, we’re more attuned to the value of shared experience, both in real time/different places and especially real time/same place. The hardest ingredient and the one that gets the least attention is comparison, the connection to the past that then leans into the future.
Attention is Not a Currency (March 19, 2023)
“Paying attention,” a common metaphor, is misleading because there are different sorts of attention, and the relationship among them isn’t reducible to numbers. Experience Stacks are a key way to understand attention.
Experience Stacks, Competitive Advantage, and Netflix’s “Wednesday” (December 4, 2022)
The new Netflix series about the daughter from The Addams Family going to a Hogwarts-style high school doesn’t ignore the earlier versions of the story: it embraces them, which is part of its success.
Misinformation & “Prebunking,” Experience Stacks & Physical Objects (September 11, 2022)
In earlier issues, I’ve mostly used Experience Stacks to talk about media experiences (movies, television, social media), but the idea of an Experience Stack is also a useful tool when talking about physical objects.
Experience Stacks, Movie Stars, and the Problem with Facebook (August 7, 2022)
Watching a movie or a TV show, particularly when it’s something in a series and/or when I recognize some of the actors, feels additive. I’m growing my expertise on a topic or a narrative world, even if that expertise has no particular economic value. The reason that fans are fans is because over time their Experience Stacks amplify the pleasures they get from individual experiences. Even if you hated the latest installment in a given franchise, you are still building your Experience Stack by watching it, so it’s not all bad.
Facebook is celebrity journalism without the movies and TV shows. The ephemerality of Facebook works against building an Experience Stack with anything other than Facebook itself.
Experience Stacks: Top Gun, Star Trek, Spider-Man (July 31, 2022)
My first explicit discussion of Experience Stacks, using how different moviegoers had both qualitatively and quantitatively different experiences of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” depending on how many of the preceding movies they had seen. One key point:
Instead of focusing on who I am before I start interacting with a product or service, Experience Stacks focus on who I become while I’m interacting with a product or service.
Why it’s so hard to think (July 24, 2022)
This is where I first started drawing the distinction between analog thinking and algorithmic thinking. Analog thinking is improvisational when it comes to context, and works a lot like rhyme:
The smallest unit of analogical thinking is rhyme. Rhyme connects different concepts by linking the sounds of the words that express them, like love and dove. There’s nothing inherently similar about the concepts of love and a small white bird. But because we can be made to notice how the words sound similar when those sounds are placed at the ends of lines of poetry or lyrics, a poem can prompt us to create a conceptual relationship.
Experience Stacks are highly analog.
Marvel’s new “Avengers: Infinity War” movie and the structure of special experiences (May 1, 2018)
I don’t talk about “experience stacks” explicitly here (because I hadn’t coined the term yet), but this is an early example of the kind of thinking that led to experience stacks. The final point is one that I still believe fervently: “what makes a product special often has more to do with how it is embedded in our lives than with any single feature of the product itself.”