The Perfect Pair: Why CJM and OKRs work so well together
An introduction to Customer Journey Management and OKRs
Over the past year, I’ve immersed myself in the world of customer journey management (CJM).
While I’ve had the joy and good fortune to meet a growing community of passionate and talented professionals, they’re almost exclusively service design or customer experience leaders. This is a curious gap. Where are the product leaders in this conversation?
Here’s the thing: Product teams are uniquely positioned to drive the core activities of journey management - listening to customers, prioritizing pain points, discovering solutions, and delivering meaningful improvements. In many organizations, the product organisation is several times larger than service design. This represents an untapped opportunity to align journey management practices with product-led growth and transformation.
An interesting approach to align product managers with CJM is through OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). In this series I will explore the synergies and complimentary nature of CJM and OKRs and take a practical look at how these can be aligned and integrated into your organisations practices.
This offers an approach to bridge the gap between the CX/service Design teams that lead on CJM and the product organisation tasked with driving business outcomes. Let’s reimagine journey management—not as a niche domain, but as a critical lever for innovation success across disciplines.
This first post explores how CJM and OKRs complement and reinforce each other, creating a unified approach to delivering exceptional customer experiences and measurable business success.
What Is Customer Journey Management?
Imagine walking in your customer’s shoes. What do they experience as they interact with your brand, product, or service? Do they feel valued? Frustrated? Delighted? This is where Customer Journey Management (CJM) comes in—a strategic approach to understand, design, and make improvements across the entire journey a customer takes with your business.
While a product approach focuses on the domain of an individual product, often a specific customer touchpoint that creates value for the business, CJM considers the holistic picture of the entire customer journey. It’s about mapping out the customer’s path, anticipating their needs, and aligning every step of the journey with their expectations. By combining empathy with data-driven insights across the entire customer journey, CJM helps businesses move beyond reactive problem-solving to proactive experience design. The result is a seamless, satisfying interactions that build loyalty and drive measurable outcomes.
But CJM isn’t just about crafting a prettier map of your customer’s journey. Its real power lies in its ability to break down silos and align your entire organization around shared goals. By connecting research insights to tangible improvements, CJM bridges gaps between teams across design, product, delivery, data, operations & leadership. It enables companies to prioritize what matters most to customers while achieving their own business objectives. Whether you're eliminating pain points, creating new touchpoints, or building a cross-channel experience that feels effortless, CJM is the key to staying one step ahead of customer expectations.
What Are OKRs?
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a goal-setting framework designed to drive measurable behavior change in the people who matter most—your customers. OKRs shift the focus from outputs (like delivering a product) to outcomes—the meaningful changes in behavior that signal success.
The magic of OKRs lies in their simplicity and adaptability. Each OKR answers the critical questions:
Who is the customer?
Does What - What is the valuable behavior we’re trying to create?
By how much should this behavior change?
This clear structure makes OKRs both aspirational and actionable, aligning teams around common goals and measurable results. Unlike vague mission statements, well-crafted objectives provide clarity of purpose, while key results define the metrics that signal progress. Together, they inspire action and ensure accountability.
OKRs aren’t just a tool—they’re also a process and a culture. Teams that adopt them effectively use an iterative cycle of setting goals, executing on them, learning from outcomes, and adapting. This builds a culture of focus, alignment, and agility, where cross-functional collaboration thrives. By embedding OKRs into the rhythm of work, organizations can break down silos and rally around shared customer problems. Shared OKRs, in particular, are transformative for teams working on interconnected parts of a customer journey, ensuring coordination and avoiding counterproductive efforts.
Whether you're building a product, improving internal processes, or optimizing a customer journey, OKRs are a proven way to connect the dots between effort and impact.
Shared Foundations: Customer-Centric and Outcome-Driven
At first glance, CJM and OKRs may seem like separate tools. CJM focuses on understanding and improving the customer experience, while OKRs target measurable outcomes. However, both are built on a shared principle: linking customer experience to business outcomes.
They aim to improve customer outcomes as a way to drive organizational success. Whether it’s a holistic customer view with rich, accurate insights through CJM or targeting specific behavior changes with OKRs, both frameworks emphasize measurable, customer-focused results as the path to growth.
Complimentary differences
Where these frameworks differ, they complement one another.
OKRs define explicit outcomes—"who does what by how much"—and connect them to customer behavior. However, the detailed understanding of the customer experience is implied, relying on the knowledge of the teams setting the goals.
CJM flips this approach. It makes the customer experience explicit, using journey maps to visualize strategic, operational, and tactical aspects of the customer’s path. While it prioritizes deep insights into the journey, the downstream business goals and solutions remain implied, relying on teams to link the journey to actionable opportunities.
This creates a powerful synergy. OKRs provide the measurable link to business results, while CJM offers the detailed, customer-centric insights to inform and enrich those goals. Together, they form a loop of understanding: OKRs define what success looks like, and CJM shows how to get there.
Cultural Impact: Embedding Focus Across the Business
Both frameworks go beyond being mere tools—they’re processes. CJM and OKRs rely on rituals, conversations, and collaboration to embed customer focus into the day-to-day work of teams. The outputs—a journey atlas for CJM and measurable goals for OKRs—are valuable, but it’s the shared understanding they foster across silos that makes them transformational.
At their best, CJM and OKRs create cultural shifts. OKRs align teams around clear objectives and key results, ensuring that everyone understands how their work contributes to the bigger picture. CJM fosters a deep organizational understanding of the customer journey, grounding decisions in real insights. Cultural changes occur when cross-functional collaboration and decision making references these frameworks in day to day routines and rituals.
A Framework for Connection
Integrating CJM and OKRs creates a unified framework that bridges strategy and execution:
Strategic Alignment: Use OKRs to anchor CJM in measurable business outcomes.
Shared Understanding: Leverage CJM journey maps to provide the customer insights needed to set meaningful OKRs.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Break down silos by aligning teams around shared customer-focused objectives.
Continuous Improvement: Use OKRs to track progress and CJM to refine the customer journey iteratively.
The Power of Integration
Integrating CJM and OKRs creates a unified framework that bridges strategy and execution:
Strategic Alignment: Use OKRs to anchor CJM in measurable business outcomes.
Shared Understanding: Leverage CJM journey maps to provide the customer insights needed to set meaningful OKRs.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Break down silos by aligning teams around shared customer-focused objectives.
Continuous Improvement: Use OKRs to track progress and CJM to refine the customer journey iteratively.
Ready to see how CJM and OKRs can work together in your organization? Stay tuned for our next post, where we’ll explore how OKRs fit into a Journey Atlas and provide practical guidance on aligning these frameworks in your team’s day-to-day work.
When talking about OKRs I reference a book called ‘Who Does What By How Much’ By Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden. While there are several good books and articles on OKRs, for me, this book is the clearest, simplest and most practically useful I have read. A big thanks to Jeff and Josh for their excellent work.
