Start with the user journey today: answer the question “What is it like today to be a user of our product (or our competitor’s product)?”
Identify patterns of frustration and delight. More importantly, identify why a certain part is frustrating or delightful.
Then ask the question: “What would it be like if we made it delightful all across?”
The process of taking something frustrating and making it delightful is innovation.
In order to discover the current user journey, start with qualitative research: spend time with users, preferably doing ethnographic research.
Do not only focus on the frustrating parts: understand what makes the good ones good, so you can later build upon them
Then use the qualitative data to drive the quantitative data: how often does this or that thing happen in the real world? Can we identify a set of footprints in the data that helps us identify a pattern and give us a sense of scale about it (from frustrating to delightful)?