Mapping Success: How OKRs Fit into a Journey Atlas
In our exploration of Customer Journey Management (CJM) and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) so far, we’ve seen how these frameworks complement each other to drive both customer-centric and business-focused outcomes. Now, let’s take a practical turn: how do OKRs fit into a Journey Atlas, and how can they bring clarity, alignment, and measurable impact to this essential tool?
What Is a Journey Atlas, and Why Does It Matter?
A Journey Atlas is a comprehensive framework for understanding and improving the customer experience. It maps out how customers interact with your organization, breaking their journey into manageable components that align with your business goals. At its core, a Journey Atlas is built on six key building blocks:
Journeys: These represent the customer’s path to achieving a specific goal. They range from macro journeys— key jobs to be done that get to the heart of why your customers choose your product or service. An example for a bank might be “Securing a mortgage”—to micro journeys, which focus on more detailed processes that make up a part of a Marco journey. An example within a ‘Securing a mortgage’ journey might be “Proving my income.” Mapping these journeys provides a structured view of the customer experience, from strategic to operational, helping teams identify critical moments that matter most and relatign these to team activities.
Insights: Deep understanding of the customer’s perceptions, emotions, and behaviors at each stage of the journey. Insights come from customer research, voice of the customer, product analytics, surveys, interactions with operational teams. These insights offer valuable real world context for identifying pains, gains and opportunities.
Goals: These are the objectives tied to each journey. Goals define what success looks like for both the customer (e.g., “easily manage my account”) and the business (e.g., “reduce churn by 10%”). Clear goals anchor the Atlas and ensure customer experience improvements drive measurable business outcomes.
Opportunities: Opportunities are specific areas where the customer’s experience can be improved. They bridge the gap between customer pain points and actionable solutions. For example, an opportunity might involve reducing friction in the onboarding process or simplifying payment flows.
Solutions: These are the tangible outputs teams create to address opportunities. Solutions might include a new feature, a service enhancement, or a policy update designed to improve the customer experience and achieve specific goals.
Metrics: Metrics track progress and measure success at every level of the Journey Atlas. These might include journey-specific KPIs (e.g., “increase completion rate of onboarding by 15%”), behavioral metrics, or broader business outcomes like revenue growth or customer satisfaction.
The Journey Atlas doesn’t just document the customer’s experience—it connects it to actionable insights, clear goals, proposed solutions and measurable results. This integration makes it a vital tool for breaking down silos and aligning teams across the end to end innovation process.
By layering OKRs onto this structure, organizations can add another dimension of precision and focus. OKRs anchor each building block of the Journey Atlas to measurable outcomes, connecting customer experience insights to actionable business priorities.
Where OKRs Fit in the Journey Atlas
OKRs can be integrated at multiple levels of the Journey Atlas, providing focus and accountability at each stage:
Business Goals: North Star objectives for the Entire Organization
At the highest level of a Journey Atlas are business goals, the North Star outcomes that guide the entire organization. These goals, such as increasing market share, driving revenue, or improving customer trust, reflect the company’s long-term aspirations and how it delivers value to customers. For instance, a bank’s goal to “be the most trusted partner in personal financial management” sets the stage for aligning every journey, opportunity, and solution.
While the business vision is typically broad and stable, OKRs break this into annual focus areas with measurable targets. Leadership defines the most important focus areas for this year to move towards the longer term vision. For example, a vision to improve trust might aim to increase Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) by a specific percentage. This approach ensures long-term objectives translate into actionable steps that cascade through the Journey Atlas, from macro journeys to solutions.
Many digital organizations already use OKRs to connect high-level business goals with day-to-day activities, so you may recognise an approach like this in your organisation.
Macro Journeys: Strategic Anchors
Macro journeys represent long-term, high-level customer goals (e.g. “Securing a mortgage” for a bank). These journeys often define a core area of value a business delivers and are critical to customer acquisition and retention.
There are many approaches to defining and setting journey goals. Each consultancy will have their own flavour of workshops, research and analysis. A good example can be found in ‘The Service Organisation’ by Kate Tarling. that results in a set of measures of service performance, broken down by effectiveness and efficiency.
Once set, the success measures for these journeys are typically long-lived. OKRs are a great way to overlay annual focus points onto these success measure. For example, you might set an OKR to improve a specific part of the journey—such as increasing customer adoption of a mobile banking app by 15%—as a focus to move toward the broader strategic journey goals.
Opportunities: Customer-Centric Targets
The Journey Management Alliance uses the really fantastic journey description from Forrester:
A Journey is customer’s path and perceptions towards a goal.
An Opportunity is therefore defined as:
‘An improvement to a specific customer’s path or perceptions in achieving their goals.’
It is a specific change to the customer’s path and perceptions that we think will lead to a change in customer behaviour.
This can be combined with an OKR, to link the change to the customer’s behaviour that signals success:
‘Who does what by how much’
An example might be:
In the securing a mortgage journey,
‘We will streamline and simplify our end to end online pre-approval process.
Which will increase the completion rate of online customers starting an online mortgage pre-approval process by 20%.’
Opportunities written in this format empower product teams to solve specific customer problems, with a clear customer centric goal that indicates success.
Solutions: Execution and Iteration
Once a team defines a solution—whether it’s a new product feature, a policy change, or a service improvement—OKRs can guide execution. At this stage, OKRs provide clear accountability for the results of the technical solution, such as UX redesign increasing the completion rate of a redesigned onboarding process by 10%.
Benefits of OKRs in the Journey Atlas
Layering OKRs onto a Journey Atlas creates powerful alignment across teams and goals. Here’s how:
Consistent Language Across Teams: OKRs provide a standardized way to articulate goals and measure progress, making it easier to interpret, compare, and align priorities across teams and organizational levels. This consistency reduces cognitive load and fosters better collaboration.
Familiarity: OKRs use a language and framework familiar to product managers and these are often already in use in parts of the organization. Using familiar language and approaches can play a part in helping product teams embrace CJM.
Customer-Centric Goals: By tying OKRs to macro journeys and opportunities, you ensure that goals are rooted in a deep understanding of customer needs and experiences.
Clarity and Focus: OKRs prioritize the most critical outcomes at each level of the Atlas, helping teams concentrate on what matters most.
Breaking Silos: OKRs allow teams to collaborate across products or services, aligning their efforts toward shared customer and business objectives.
Measurable Impact: By focusing on specific behavior changes (e.g., “who does what by how much”), OKRs bring precision and accountability to the broader insights provided by the Journey Atlas.
The Power of Integration
When OKRs are integrated into a Journey Atlas, they support the connection of a customer experience with actionable goals, while also creating a consistent language across CJM and product teams that simplifies understanding and adoption.
In our next post, we’ll explore the rituals and processes that bring OKRs and CJM to life, creating a culture where these frameworks thrive together. Ready to unlock the full potential of your Journey Atlas? Stay tuned!
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.
