Pega Express basics for designers

Pega Platform™ applications drive and facilitate customer interactions. These interactions are referred to as customer journeys, which start when clients first hear about a product offering and continue to the point where they are no longer a customer.

Pega Express™ is an agile approach that uses design thinking practices to capture the customer journey and quickly deliver a Minimum Loveable Product (MLP) release. The Pega Express approach breaks the customer journey into smaller pieces, called Microjourneys™, which drive the organization to achieve a specific goal. An MLP release is the simplest solution that can be delivered quickly, and that enables customers to accomplish one or more goals in their journey.

Pega Express focuses on delivering one goal at a time rather than attempting to develop the entire customer journey at the start. To define an MLP release, the approach focuses on three core elements of a great application: Microjourneys, personas and channels, and data and data interfaces.

A Microjourney is a small part of the overall customer journey and focuses on accomplishing a specific goal. For example, a customer wants to change their address. This scenario is a Microjourney that starts with the customer's request and results in an outcome, where the customer address is changed in the company's records.

Personas determine who interacts with the application (by their objectives, tasks, needs, attitudes, skillsets, and behaviors), and channels determine how these individuals interact with the application. For example, a persona is a customer or a company employee, and a channel is a web portal or a chatbot. An application can have multiple personas and multiple channels.

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Data is the information that the Microjourney interacts with to accomplish the customer's goal, and the data interface defines where the data comes from or where it is persisted. An application can interact with multiple types of data, and data can employ multiple interfaces.   

In the address change example, the customer's address is data, and the system in which the information resides is the data interface. In the MLP release, this information might reside in Pega Platform as the system of record, but in a subsequent release, the data interface might change to another system where customer data is persisted. Pega Express recommends that you capture data objects with their appropriate interfaces and align them with the appropriate MLP release.

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