bain: npsx kinetics
A self-serve CX analytics product from Bain's NPSx venture. Journey scores, experience drivers, and customer verbatims in one place, so CX teams can see what to fix and why.
- 85%
- unsatisfied with how their company measures CX
- 94%
- not confident it supports decisions
- 96%
- can't calculate the ROI of a CX initiative
Kinetics began with a stakeholder question: Bain sits on deep customer-experience expertise and data, so could that become a product? Bain's own research made the case. Practitioners didn't trust their CX measurement, and daily reality matched the stats. Initiative numbers lived in Excel, and every leadership meeting meant rebuilding the same views in PowerPoint.
Bridger embedded with the Bain team to start the engine: one PM, a Bain designer, two Bain engineers, and two of us from Bridger. I owned research and UI. I synthesized practitioner interviews into personas and jobs-to-be-done, then translated the discovery work into wireframes mapping four workstreams: Explore to diagnose the journey, Notify for alerts, Scenario Planning to model tradeoffs, and Data Configuration to feed them all.
The MVP shipped the Explore spine. Start at the company overview and watch experience scores move over time. Drop into the product view, where every journey and sub-journey is scored green to red so problem areas jump out. Then go one level deeper: sub-journey detail ties score movements to experience drivers and raw customer verbatims by channel. You go from "the number moved" to "here's who said what." A shared design system, built alongside the screens, carried all of it.
Scenario Planning was the original vision: executives modeling budget tradeoffs against customer impact. It didn't make the MVP, and looking back that was the right call. You can't model scenarios on numbers nobody trusts yet, so the product had to earn trust in the data first. Diagnose, then predict. Scenario Planning and Notify stayed in the wireframes while Explore shipped.
Bridger's engagement ended at handoff. We passed the MVP designs and the design system to Bain's team before launch, and the product shipped as Kinetics AI, one of the four products in Bain's NPSx venture, billed as the first data-analytics platform built for CX.
Two things stuck with me. The framing stage carries more design leverage than any single screen; that four-workstream wireframe map did more to align stakeholders than all the high-fidelity work that followed. And an honest slice beats the whole vision. What launched is recognizably the Explore spine from those wireframes.