The Experience Maker's Question

Are you making experiences on purpose — or by accident?

Your team is experiencing every update you send. The question is what kind.

You spend 45 minutes building the perfect project status update. Clear structure. Right stakeholders. All the right data. You reviewed it twice, then sent it.

The developer who received it read it once, put it aside, and felt nothing.

Not hostile. Not checked out. Processed.

You had produced good content. You had no idea what experience you had created.

The Principle: The Experience Maker's Question

You are always making an experience for your team. The question is whether you're doing it on purpose.

Every status update, kick-off meeting, Slack message, and stakeholder presentation is an experience touchpoint. The person on the other end receives an experience: of being seen or processed, of knowing where they stand or being left to guess, of feeling like a person on a project or a resource on a schedule.

Most PMs track what they communicate. Strategic PMs ask what their team experiences when they receive it.

That gap closes through a single question most PMs never think to ask before hitting send. More on that in a moment.

To be clear: generating output is necessary. Status updates need to be sent. Kick-offs need to run. Slack messages need to happen. The output matters. Without attention to what the receiver experiences, though, the most well-crafted update in the world leaves people feeling processed, and processed teams stop raising the things you need to hear.

What Marcus Buckingham Gets Right About Your Project

This is the first issue in a series applying Buckingham's framework to GenAI in project management. Each issue will show you one element of what makes a project environment one people lean into, and how AI either helps you build it or erodes it without your noticing.

Marcus Buckingham uses the phrase "experience maker" to describe what leaders are, whether they realize it or not. His research finding: the quality of experience people have on a team determines whether they lean in or armor up. Not the sophistication of the plan. Not the quality of the tools. The experience.

Here's where this lands for PMs who use GenAI.

AI gives you more touchpoints, not fewer. Every AI-generated status report, meeting summary, and team communication is a touchpoint the receiver experiences. With AI, you produce more, faster. Which means you're creating more experiences per week than you ever did before.

More touchpoints means more chances to design experiences that make your team lean in. It also means more chances to generate content at speed and create experiences that make people armor up: quietly, incrementally, one processed update at a time.

The AI Advantage

For thinking: Before you write or generate any team communication, use AI as an experience design tool, not only a drafting tool. Ask it: "Given what I know about this person's current workload and what they care about on this project, what will they experience when they receive this?" That's AI in Mirror Mode — asking AI to reflect back what your communication creates for the receiver, before you send it.

For communicating: Once you've decided what experience you want to create ("I want this person to feel informed and in control of their next decision"), AI can help you craft language that delivers it. The sequence matters: experience-first, then language. Language-first and hope-it-lands is how that developer felt processed.

AI amplifies the experience you've already decided to create.

This Week's Prompt

Use this prompt to audit your last three team communications:

Copy and paste this into Claude or ChatGPT:

WHO: Act as an organizational psychologist with expertise in team experience design and project communication

WHY: because I need to evaluate whether my recent team communications are creating the experiences I intend

WHAT: review these three team communications I've sent this week and:Identify what experience each one likely created for the receiver — not what information it conveyed, but what the person likely felt when they received itFlag any that may have created an unintentional experience (confusion, dismissal, isolation, or unnecessary urgency)Suggest one specific change to each that would shift the receiver's experience toward feeling more seen, more informed, or more capable

HOW: provide a 3–4 sentence experience assessment for each communication, followed by a one-sentence rewrite suggestion

[Paste your three communications here]

What this reveals: whether you've been designing team experiences or generating team content.

My Results After Running This Prompt

I realized I don't share my own experience with running the prompts in this newsletter.

I am changing that today.

So here is what I did:

• I used CoPilot
  • Mainly because it can process against my email directly
• I chose the "Work" tab within CoPilot to make sure that it looked at my email
• I did not attach three emails. I left it open. And CoPilot came back with:
  • "I couldn’t see three pasted or attached messages in your note, so I reviewed three team emails you sent this week from Sent Items that appear to fit your request"
• So CoPilot chose three randoms emails from the last week
• CoPilot provided detail with each of the three random emails: what was good, what "could" be a bad experience and a possible rewrite. Too much detail to add here.
• I will share with you the summary CoPilot provided:
  • "Quick read across all three
    Your communication style this week reads as clear, action-oriented, and direct—people likely know where you stand and what you need.
    The biggest experience risk isn’t confusion; it’s that directness can sometimes land as pre-decided, public, or heavier than intended, especially when a message references past inequity, uses absolute language, or tracks responses in-group.
    A simple pattern that would shift several of these messages is: name the purpose, add one sentence of human context, and leave one clear opening for the receiver’s agency"
• My Takeaway:
  • Be purposeful and collaborative in my communication

Get Intentional,

Paul

P.S. If you run the prompt above and it surfaces an interaction where you generated good content but created a bad experience — contact me and tell me what it caught. I'm collecting these for a future issue on the most common unintentional experiences PMs create without realizing it. I read every response.