Table of Contents
In a rush? Download the PDF for later
Download the ResourceWhy your Software Experience Maturity matters
Every customer, employee, and partner experiences your business through software. And in today’s world, every organization—no matter the industry—is a software company.
When those experiences work, they unlock growth, efficiency, and trust. When they don’t, you feel it everywhere: projects stall, employees find workarounds, customers churn, and risk seeps in through shadow IT or non-compliant tools.
The Software Experience Management (SXM) Maturity Matrix is designed to cut through the noise. It gives you a clear, shared picture of your current state, the outcomes available at the next stage, and the practical actions that get you there. It’s a consultative tool (not just a scorecard) to help you:
- Identify where your capabilities sit today across data, insight, action, and governance
- Pinpoint the biggest opportunities for improvement
- Build the business case for change with measurable ROI
How to use this guide
Use it as both a quick reference and a working tool—to self-assess your current maturity, align cross-functional teams on priorities, and map a concrete plan to advance one stage at a time.
The SXM Maturity journey, at a glance
The SXM Maturity Matrix describes the progression that companies follow as they improve how they manage and optimize software experiences.
While every company’s path is unique, the stages are consistent: you move from firefighting and scattered tools to coordinated, AI-powered insight and action, with measurable business outcomes at every step.
This isn’t about jumping to the end as quickly as possible. The most successful organizations advance one stage at a time, building sustainable capabilities that stick.
Plot your SXM Maturity
No two organizations advance in a straight line. It’s common to be more mature in one area (say, data readiness) and still early in another (like acting on insights). The value of the Maturity Matrix is in seeing where you are today across multiple dimensions so you can prioritize the right next moves.
How to use this survey:
- For each question, select the statement that best describes your current approach.
- Each option corresponds to a stage in the SXM Maturity Matrix (Reactive → Predictive).
- Your answers may not all fall into the same stage. The goal is to pinpoint where you are strongest, and where advancing one level will have the biggest impact.
Your answers across these nine areas form a snapshot of your current maturity.
Think of it less as a single score and more as a heatmap of strengths and gaps. That profile makes the path forward clear: focus first on the areas where advancing one stage will create the biggest business impact, whether that’s unlocking new revenue, cutting costs, or reducing risk.
SXM Maturity, stage-by-stage
Each stage in the SXM Maturity Matrix has its own challenges, goals, and indicators that mean it’s time to move forward.
Click image to enlarge
Seeing the stages side by side helps you do two things:
- Recognize yourself in the challenges — “yes, that’s us right now.”
- Visualize what better looks like one step ahead.
Most organizations don’t fit neatly in a single stage. Some teams might be scaling while others are still proving. That’s normal. What matters is finding the center of gravity and using that as the anchor point for your next move.
The real value of the Maturity Matrix is knowing where to focus to make progress that sticks. Advancing from one stage to the next, even in just one or two areas, creates momentum that compounds across the business.
With that in mind, let’s look at how to move forward: the practical actions (in strategy, operations, technology, and organization) that help you advance one stage at a time.
Actions to advance
Advancing along the SXM Maturity Matrix is about knowing which levers to pull and which accelerators to apply at the right time.
We think about progress in two layers:
Maturity Growth Levers — The four categories every advancement touches:
- Strategy – Clarify outcomes and align investment to business impact.
- Operations – Build processes and governance that scale.
- Technology – Enable the right data, integrations, and capabilities.
- Organization – Align people, skills, and structures to new ways of working.
Stage Accelerators — The targeted actions that help you move from one stage to the next. These are where the rubber meets the road.
The Growth Levers keep your organization balanced as you climb, ensuring progress doesn’t stall in one lane. The Stage Accelerators give you traction. Together, they make maturity advancement a deliberate, achievable process.
The business outcomes of SXM Maturity
At every stage of the SXM Maturity Matrix, advancing one level unlocks measurable impact across revenue, cost, and risk.
Maturity Matrix use cases
The pillars of SXM maturity
Every advancement in the maturity matrix comes from building strength across three core capabilities. These pillars work together—if one lags, the others can’t deliver their full impact. As you move up the stages, each pillar expands in depth, reach, and sophistication.
Gather
Capture usage, sentiment, and feedback across all applications
At lower maturity stages, data is fragmented across tools, and feedback is mostly anecdotal. As you advance, you consolidate sources, connect sentiment to actual behavior, and collect feedback at scale. By the most mature stages, collection is automated, predictive, and proactive.
Sample capabilities:
- Usage analytics across web, mobile, and in-app
- Targeted in-app surveys and sentiment tracking
- Unified feedback systems linked to behavior data
- Predictive feedback collection with AI-powered analysis
Learn
Turn raw data into actionable insights to prioritize and plan.
Data only creates value when it’s trusted, accessible, and applied. Early stages rely on specialists to run reports. Mature organizations democratize analytics, uncover patterns in real time, and use AI to predict future behavior and needs.
Sample capabilities:
- Self-service analytics and journey tracking
- Session replays tied to specific user segments or events
- Cross-application adoption and performance reporting
- AI-driven pattern recognition and predictive analytics
Act
Deliver personalized, timely guidance and optimize in real time.
Acting on insight means getting out of the dashboards and into the user experience. Maturity grows from static, one-off messages to orchestrated, personalized, and continuously optimized guidance across channels.
Sample capabilities:
- Targeted in-app guides and onboarding flows
- Multi-channel orchestration across web, email, and in-product
- Embedded guidance and design system integration for consistency
- Real-time personalization with AI-driven optimization
Maturity by pillar: Gather
Data gathering & user feedback
Focus on systematically gathering both qualitative and quantitative data about user experiences, consolidating fragmented feedback sources into reliable, actionable insights.
Maturity by pillar: Learn
Analytics & insights
Transform raw data into actionable insights through analytics, feedback tools, and systematic analysis to understand user behavior patterns and friction points.
Maturity by pillar: Act
Implementation & optimization
Targeted communications, guidance, and optimization strategies based on insights gathered, moving from reactive to proactive user experience improvements.
Your next step
The most effective way to use this guide is as a springboard into action. Plot where you sit today, align on the gaps, and choose the one or two levers that will make the biggest difference.
That’s where we can help. Pendo partners with you to:
- Facilitate a quick maturity workshop to map your current placement.
- Highlight the Stage Accelerators that will deliver the fastest ROI.
- Build a targeted X → X+1 plan so progress is clear, measurable, and achievable.
Every tool you need for better software experiences
Every department relies on software to drive a competitive edge, but for many companies, software investments fail to meet expectations. Pendo’s no-code Software Experience Management (SXM) platform helps teams pinpoint issues, optimize workflows, and enhance usability—no engineering needed.
The outcome? Boosted revenue, reduced costs, and minimized risk. Business users gain control. Engineers enjoy freedom. Everyone wins.
![Software experience buyer's guide [2025]](https://cdn.builder.io/api/v1/image/assets%2F6a96e08774184353b3aa88032e406411%2F75bf49636d71436a94d038bf81298768?format=webp)
