Pivotal Moments Framework™
Executive & Cross-functional Team Courseware for product and AI operational excellence.
Charting engaging customer KPIs with business growth through aligned organizational product, platform, and marketing team’s experience requirements: tactical playbooks from prioritized, heuristics for proven performance.
“Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time.
Vision with action can change the world.”
— Joel Arthur Barker Ratcliffe
Truths today
We are asked to do more, with less resources.
We are asked to use AI without guidelines or formated data.
We are asked to optimize team efficiencies without frameworks.
We are measured without enough connected metrics to validate.
We are replacing roles with AI, instead of optimizing their roles in AI.
Humans improve outcomes, AI only accelerates what’s improved.
Trends: CX & AI fails despite significant “transformation” investments. Coincidence?
GLOBAL 100 COs. CLAIM TO BE CUSTOMER-FOCUSED BUT…
75%
ONLY BACK THEM UP WITH EXECUTIVE ACTIONS (Forrester)
36%
What’s happening? Playbooks don’t exist.
Most organizations have invested billions in “digital transformations,” yet CEOs have been clamoring “Where’s the ROI?” as CX metrics fall short. Complexity has increased in products, platforms, and support, resulting in tech debt and confusion over roadmap priorities.
OF CORPORATE AI/LLM INITATIVES FAIL, SHOW ZERO RETURN DESPITE $30B - 40B IN ENTERPRISE INVESTEMENTS (MIT LAB)
95%
OF CEOs BELIEVE EMPLOYEES CAN ARTICULATE COMPLETE CUSTOMER JOURNEYS. COINCIDENCE?
16%
What’s happening? Barriers remain.
AI/LLMs are trained from historical data, not future outcomes. Product teams struggle to solve CX friction points due to a lack of awareness that blocks supportive teams from achieving CX success. Barriers between customers and businesses are missing solutions in requirements. Research shows performance significantly rises when you identify and document this CX clarity.
What can orgs. do? Align on team goals.
Success depends on overcoming key barriers collectively: discrete customer moments in brand decisions. Teams with a “why” framework on customer mindsets can effectively prioritize and plan. Empowered to prioritize gaps, the framework improves cross-functional decisions in confidence.
My quintessential reason for developing my Pivotal Moments™ framework circa 2015.
OF ORGS LACK FRAMEWORKS TO PRIORITIZE PROJECTS.
-Forrester “Precision to your measurement” study 2024
77%
At stake? CX optimized revenue from AI frameworks
“Tech and AI doesn’t repair misalignments, it accelerates them. Automating flawed team processes and data only accelerates costly decisions.”
— Josh Nard
Non-context data input = garbage AI outcomes.
A recent 2025 MIT Lab industry study shows cascading failures of not having proper data to provide quality outcomes. Participants cited barriers that reflect foundational business and market hueristics with the “GenAI Divide”: they resist tools that don't adapt to CX metrics, model quality fails without this context, and UX suffers when systems can't remember or find data points.
Consumer adoption of personal AI tools has surged (40%) yet enterprise usage has suffered, described as “unreliable.” A significant number of workers already use AI tools privately, reporting productivity gains, while their companies' formal AI initiatives stall.
AI failures: barriers to enterprise AI
Currently in development:
Courses, playbook templates, and AI consulting.
I am currently working on a series of team training videos, templated playbooks, and consulting packets available in 2026. Join my mailing list below to be the first to hear more on the launch.
Stay ahead of your competition by joining my confidential list.
Coming Q1 26' -
Coming Q1 26' -
“Invest in cross-functional alignment to deliver connected experiences. Strong alignment leads to outcomes:
Organizations who are highly aligned report 1.6x faster revenue growth and 1.4x better customer engagement. …hire an outside partner and train your team when necessary.”
— CX Leaders: Allocate Your 2025 Budget To Reverse CX Declines And Boost Quality; Forrester
Forrester recommendations:
Barriers: Impacts in CX & AI platform investments.
Product/channel realities:
Team silos: delivering disjointed updates that accept status quo barriers.
Product and IT/Platform budgets are projected to continue to rise in 2025 between 8-15%.
Customer realities:
Want a solved experience. It doesn’t need to be amazing - just effortless satisfaction.
“Pros haven’t convinced executives to invest in CX…just over half of CX decision-makers project budgets to be flat or slight 1% to 4% in 2024.”
The impact: ‘Status quo’ growth risks:
Maintaining tech debt to sacrifice the experience.
Brand suffers from below-average scores, worsening ROAS (advertising).
Customers find other brand that figured it out.
Quarterly reports sacrifice long-term experiences.
Stats show startups replace journey gaps with agile solutions.
Four common barriers to customer success
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Product Conflict
Customers Do Not Adopt the Value
One-time or multiple purchases are met with misunderstood value, complicating growth.
Symptom: Customers do not project their lifestyle values with your organization’s goals.
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Services Conflict
Lifestyles Do Not Align to the Brand
Consumers are missing the value to your services or digital products.
Symptom: Customers do not effectively utilize a service in intended touchpoints of their journey.
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Conversion Conflict
Consumers are Not Becoming Customers
Consumers are aware of, or respect your brand but for unknown reasons are not buying in.
Symptom: Customers speak favorably of the brand, yet recursive purchases are impacted.
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Reach Conflict
Brand Awareness is Not Extended
Effective channel marketing is not successful in key markets of loyalty or growth.
Symptom: Targeted audience messaging is not changing/aligning behavior to brand adoption.
Brands that benefited from my Pivotal Moments System™
Podcast short: Intro to Pivotal Moments™
Generated by NotebookLM, podcast short on Pivotal Moments explores customer engagement gaps by defining empathy-led moments for businesses to identify and measure.
“It’s not that employees don’t care, it’s a lack of tactical, action plans that block success.”
- Josh Nard
2015 Pivotal Moments™ inception: Caterpillar’s leadership harmonizing team discussions into a tactical product strategy for a single, global platform.
Curious? Let’s chat about solving your customer’s moments.
Available for short-term leadership consulting engagements on my Pivotal Moments™ Framework.
The solution: Heuristic playbooks in consumer decisions™.
Foundations: Pivotal Moments™ defines customer expectation requirements to activate brand value with ROI.
Pivotal Moments™ System | Foundations
Product engagement converges @ business & customer purpose.
Your business goals:
Attracting qualified prospects
Writing measurable requirements
Scale impact for new customers
Brand satisfaction & behavioral influence
Building and sustaining engagement
Retaining, optimizing high-value customers
Maximizing customer revenue through value exchange
Your customers’ goals:
Help me find the best product or service for my needs
Make buying and using easy for me
Educate, support and inspire me, and reward me for my loyalty
What else should I be considering – keep me informed
Connect me with others for advice and inspiration
Pivotal Moments™ System | Value
What Pivotal Moments System deliver:
1) Human-Behavioral
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They define behavior driven communication from shopper affinities with tactical strategy.
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• Triggers & Signals
• Emotions & Barriers
• Behaviors/Routines
• Customer Goals
• Persona Readiness Heuristic
• Shopping affinities
• Demographic Insights
• Psychographic purchasing insights
2| Business-Actionable
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They clarify customer requirements planning, personalization and channel messaging.
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• Channel Dependencies
• Formats and Attributes
• Timing/Cadence and paths
• Personalization affinities
• Activation use cases
• KPI Metrics and Readiness
• Key messaging priority
• Transactional spending
3) Brand-Measurable
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Lastly, they define waypoints to measure CX for product-optimized business R.O.I. performance.
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• Performance Metrics
• Channel Destinations
• CTAs and Pre-Send Prep
• Learning Plans & Testing
• Metric Frameworks
• Roadmap improvements
Pivotal Moments™ System | Planning
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
— Mike Tyson
Shortcomings in business strategy commonly fall within team awareness on execution. Having a playbook on customer realities is how successful companies win.
Pivotal Moments playbooks: A heuristic in brand activation planning™.
Action plans: defining requirements with momentary CX decisions, teams collectively coordinate solutions.
Pivotal Moments™ System | Hueristic playbooks
How it works: analyzing customer data into intelligence to anticipate and respond to behavioral decisions.
Heuristic P.M.™ definitions:
Pivotal Behaviors™ from shopper traits and engagement patterns
Pivotal Maturity™ team readiness of product, marketing and tech
Pivotal Barriers™ experiences required or avoided in a gap analysis
Pivotal KPIs™ framework connecting business goals with touchpoint analysis
Pivotal Narrative™ for executive-level insight storytelling with dev. epics
Pivotal Personalized™ from psychographic shopper, product attributes
Pivotal Prioritization™ scores team readiness with priorities
Pivotal Conditional CX™ Experiences/pathing product/channel success KPIs
Pivotal Sentiment™* in positive and negative brand messaging
Pivotal Trust™* from trust, engagement and churn
Pivotal Prompts™* to optimze richer data analysis into moments
Strategic outcomes:
Customer Persona Definitions triggers and routines
Customer Data Profiling for next-best-action attributes in content tagging
Activation Strategy for omnichannel key messaging
User Pathways CTAs on channel planning KPIs
CX User Stories / requirements across channel, product activation
Campaign matrix connects current campaign performance within moment recommendations
KPI Performance frameworks to measure CX engagement
Roadmaps optimizing personalization development
10-Step “discovery to action” approach: Heuristic measured, tactical playbooks
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#1 Assess | stakeholder's goal alignment, deltas
Assess what your teams want to achieve. Meet 1:1 with stakeholders to evaluate their goals and how they align or have detlas between teams. Conduct readiness evaluations from questions between teams.
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#2 Audit | current CX, metrics, research usage
Audit what you have currently. Where are the gaps in what you seek to accomplish? Understanding your customer’s joy and pain points with your products/services in daily routines. Understand what behaviors and motivators move them.
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#3 Define | Targets within CX & EX journeys
To be a customer-centric organization, you must lead with your customers and employees who support them. Take the researcher and begin to map their behaviors with how employees currently support them. Identify where there may be gaps including preferred channels such as chatbots.
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#4 Evaluate | connect business goals w/ CX moments
After you have evaluated your various customer goals, map the business product and services to their journey. How do they serve them? Where are the deficits? Identify where you are stronger and weaker using actual data. Consider scoring such as NPS or CLV toward these gaps.
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#5 Develop | blueprint dependencies
Go several levels deeper in the journey with identified “swim lanes” of various business considerations and processes that you follow. Identify where impacts to the experience creates resistance in a negative - or positive way.
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#6 Architect | measurable KPIs to moments
Business goals can be challenging to measure progress without progress. What gets measured, gets managed. My work connects business outcome targets to journeys to touchpoints with measurable metrics. This allows teams to better implement roadmaps by adding dozens of right fit metrics.
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#7 Communicate | solution barriers to success
Barriers begin to emerge as you identify key, “pivotal moments” that link your customer’s needs with the brand. Identify problems and perceived barriers. Ask why employees respond the way they do in culture, policy. Identify communication tactics for a resolution.
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#8 Readiness | Org. change mgmt. in moments
Run heuristics an communicate to leadership on action plans of my vetted evaluations on organizational readiness in CX, EX, customer data maturity and employee KPI engagement. Include Persona and team OKR readiness that are connected to business goals.
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#9 Develop | prioritize quarterly roadmaps
Once these barriers are identified with proposed resolutions, begin to assess feasible outcomes with long-term implementation. Consider employee training, policies, and procedures in addition to technical or digital updates.
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#10 Action | Delegate PRDs/req. ownerships
What you gain are greater contextual requirements for your customers that are written to their pivotal moments of success. With greater impact, we also add weighted value between personas to understand personalization and channel preferences.
In development:
Courses, playbook templates, and AI consulting.
I am currently working on a series of team training videos, templated playbooks, and consulting packets available in 2026. Join my mailing list below to be the first to hear more on the launch.
Stay ahead of your competition by joining my confidential list.
Coming Q1 26' -
Coming Q1 26' -
Tiered playbook services:
AI+Human Consulting (Q&A)
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I provide consulting services where I can meet with your teams to discuss how to gather leadership buy-in and current readiness evaluations.
I can include additional meetings to support supporting teams.
I am currently working on a set of training videos in 2H 2025 to support global team distributions as well.
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Contact me for more information on the amount of support you will need beyond starter discussions. This can range from a few hours to multiple that fall under a subscription.
Team Courses (Applying practice)
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Currently in development, a series of training videos that will be included with a tiered subscription service. This is optional for training junior and mid-level teams on conducting audits, research, and heuristics to guide your teams free of bias and confusion.
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Targeting Q3 2025: Subscriptions will include all updates and expansions for various teams. It will allow you to stay in the know on team best practices.
Playbook templates (Action)
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These are the heart of all “living” documents your team will use to conduct audits, blueprints and requirements with prioritization. They include communications with your executive leadership.
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Currently targeting Q3 2025: trusted sources on a small to large subscription model on all available templates that include instructions. This is developing over the year with new available templates such as “pivotal” prompt engineering that is evolving at a rapid pace with my certifications.
Organizational brands who have benefited
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Caterpillar SFMC transformation
Was the first application of Pivotal Moments where I connected the business customer, dealer and Caterpillar’s sales support teams.
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Samsung N.A. eCommerce, CRM
Converted Samsung’s sales funnel into a journey model between eCommerce, CRM, and paid media.
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United Airlines' ops performance
For improving operational performance analytics, we tied Pivoal Moments in the customer journey with metrics for dashboard management.
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Stelantis CRM ownership cycle
I overhauled Stellantis’ CRM ownership experience across brands, beginning with Jeep. This allowed more targeted messaging from owner personas.
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Sunwing/Westjet CRM optimization
Created from the ground up, a new CRM platform tied to pivotal moments across the airline and resort journeys for personalization and wallet share.
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Marriott sales and loyalty call center
Completely overhauled Marriott’s call center application between loyalty and sales teams, connected to their eCommerce experience.
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Wisely ADP sales & CRM
Pivotal Moments help migrate two different card programs into a single web experience, while maintaining personalization between the two.
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Northeastern U. graduate enrollment
Defined an entirely new online and CRM engagement for their graduate program in 14 Pivotal Moments, from awareness to enrollment that increased key KPIs.
Stay in the know or inquire on activating your pivotal moments.
Pivotal Moments™ System | Value Return
The ROI:
Empowering your teams’ agency on joint decisions; over outsider consultant/agencies.
Pivotal Moments™ is not another deliverable, it empowers cross-functional teams with a how and why to clarify customers’ decisions in a framework that prioritizes aligned decisions.
Unlike most agencies, it provides business heuristics playbooks ‘what’ with tactical ‘why’ actions to activate your business strategies.
“Rope is only as strong to how it secured, this system securely ties business goals to KPI team execution.”
- Josh Nard
Need convincing?
Tony Fadell driving “why” into a team’s mission (see 1:09:25)
“If you have a great story, and you know the ‘why,’ then you can communicate it (to teams). Then they bring their own thing into it. It becomes emotional for them too. …It’s not just a job, it’s a mission.”
“If you instill that mission and that ‘why’ into a team… you get a 10x.”
Forbes/Forrester August 2024: Invest in cross-functional alignment to deliver connected experiences.
Article: CX Leaders: Here’s How To Allocate Your 2025 Budget To Reverse CX Declines And Boost Quality; Forbes/Forrester August 2024
1.6x faster revenue growth
Reported organizations whose marketing, digital, and CX teams are highly aligned report over their peers.
1.4x better CX engagement
Reported organizations whose marketing, digital, and CX teams are highly aligned report over their peers.
Podcast short on Pivotal Prompts™
Generated by NotebookLM, I created a podcast short on sharing an example of how my prompt engineering framework helps teams become confident in decisions to optimize experiences.