The evolution from journey mapping to journey management
A global field and category are rapidly emerging
In today's competitive landscape, a customer-first strategy is essential for organizations of all sizes, spanning various sectors including enterprises, consulting firms, non-profits, and government entities. Journey mapping has become a key tool in this strategy, enabling a collaborative understanding of customer experiences by visualizing user interactions over time. These maps are instrumental in identifying areas for improvement and opportunities across customer touchpoints, facilitating a unified team perspective on both present and future customer journeys. Widely adopted by teams from design to marketing, journey mapping sparks cross-functional insights and fosters a culture of shared objectives and innovation.
A key problem with journey maps: in many organizations, they create short-term insight and excitement but then are easily forgotten – they fail to become drivers of lasting change. The result is valuable resources wasted, duplication of work, and disjointed innovation processes.
A second key problem: traditional journey maps are rarely effective for initiating execution in non-design teams. They must be translated into similar-but-different documents, such as a roadmap document or briefing document, among others—leading to one-up deliverables and incremental work creating those artifacts. Any changes to those ‘downstream’ artifacts require manual updates to ‘upstream’ journey maps.
“It will be critical for service design leaders to evolve these artifacts into management tools that facilitate regular, integrated oversight of ongoing service implementations across the company.” (Gillespie et al., 2019)
Until recently, there was a gap in the existing tools. What was missing were methods and tools that allow journeys to be managed and used over time and by a diverse set of stakeholders.
The rapidly emerging field of Journey Management fills this gap: It is the practice of documenting, designing, and iterating customer journeys over time with an agile, continuous improvement mindset—based on systematic journey insights and business objectives. It gives practitioners tools and methods to drive execution, specifically at the management level.
Practitioners are upskilling from traditional CX management, service design, and other innovation disciplines. Platforms are being created, connecting rich data sets to make better decisions faster. And the adoption of AI fastracks workflows.
It is an exciting time to be at the forefront of this global movement, and I am looking forward to sharing my insights as a professional and educator in the field.
This blog has been adopted and updated from an academic paper on Journey Management, first published by Florian Vollmer in the proceedings of DMI Academic, Toronto 2022 (pages 254 ff). https://www.dmi.org/page/ADMC2022Proceedings
Work illustrations by Storyset from www.storyset.com