Introducing Odyssey

Most organizations that run complex digital workflows share the same quiet problem.

They can see where people drop off.
They can guess why.
But when someone asks, “What would happen if we changed this?”—the honest answer is usually: we don’t know until we try.

Trying, however, is expensive. In high-stakes environments—government services, financial applications, healthcare intake, compliance workflows—“just ship it and see” isn’t acceptable. A small change can reduce access, increase abandonment, or introduce unintended harm, and the cost of learning after the fact is borne by real people.

Odyssey exists to change that.

What Odyssey Is

Odyssey is a behavioral simulation engine for real user journeys.

It models how people actually move through multi-step, rule-driven experiences and lets you ask a different kind of question—before you make changes:

What would happen if we moved this step?
What if we removed this requirement?
Who benefits, and who is at risk?

Instead of dashboards or raw funnels, Odyssey produces something more useful:
a written, defensible prediction, grounded in real data and explicit assumptions.

Not just what might change—but why.

Why We Built It

Today’s analytics tools are very good at describing the past. They are much worse at supporting decisions about the future.

Teams are often forced into one of two uncomfortable options:

• Guess and deploy, hoping the impact is positive
• Run live experiments, even when experimentation is risky, slow, or unethical

Odyssey introduces a third option: counterfactual foresight.

By treating journeys as probabilistic systems—rather than static funnels—Odyssey can simulate proposed changes and estimate their impact without touching production or experimenting on users.

This is especially important in environments where:

• changes affect access to essential services
• compliance and auditability matter
• decisions must be explained to non-technical stakeholders

How Odyssey Thinks

Odyssey is opinionated by design.

It is built around a few core principles:

1. Journeys are systems, not screens

Every form or workflow is modeled as a state machine: steps, transitions, costs, and failure modes. This makes behavior computable, not just observable.

2. Predictions must be explainable

Odyssey favors interpretable models and explicit reasoning over opaque accuracy. Every result surfaces its primary drivers, risks, and confidence bounds.

3. Outputs should stand on their own

The primary artifact Odyssey produces is a decision memo—something you can read, share, and reference later. No dashboards required.

4. Safety beats speed

Odyssey is designed for situations where getting it wrong is worse than moving fast. It prioritizes clarity, uncertainty, and tradeoffs.

What You Can Do With Odyssey

With real usage data flowing in, Odyssey allows teams to:

• Simulate moving, removing, or deferring steps
• Predict changes in completion before deployment
• Identify which cohorts are most affected
• Surface behavioral drivers like cognitive load or validation friction
• Explicitly document assumptions, risks, and limitations

The result isn’t just a number—it’s a reasoned recommendation.

Who It’s For

Odyssey is built for people who make decisions about complex user experiences:

• product and UX leaders
• policy and operations teams
• engineering managers
• compliance and accessibility reviewers

It is intentionally not a general analytics tool, a session replay platform, or a form builder. Odyssey exists to support decisions, not to replace existing instrumentation.

What Comes Next

This is the beginning.

The initial focus is narrow by design: real journeys, real data, real decisions. Over time, Odyssey will expand into richer simulations, synthetic populations, and deeper impact analysis—but always anchored to the same question:

What would happen if…?

If you’ve ever had to justify a high-stakes change with incomplete information, Odyssey was built for you.

We’re excited to share more soon.