Journey Mapping in Product Development

Great journey maps start from the intersection of user touchpoints. A customer journey map shows a customer's experiences with your organization, from when they identify a need to whether that need is met. Journey maps are often shown as straight lines with touchpoints explaining a user's challenges. start •—------------>• finish At the heart of this approach is the user, assuming that your product or service is the one they choose to use in their journey. While journey maps help explain the conceptual journey, they often give the wrong impression of how users are trying to solve their problems. In reality, users start from different places, have unique ways of understanding their problems, and often have expectations that your service can't fully meet. Our testing and user research over the years has shown how varied these problem-solving approaches can be. Building a great journey map involves identifying a constellation of touchpoints rather than a single, linear path. Users start from different points and follow various paths, making their journeys complex and varied. These paths intersect to form signals, indicating valuable touchpoints. Users interact with your product or service in many different ways. User journeys are not straightforward and involve multiple touchpoints and interactions…many of which have nothing to do with your company. Here’s how you can create valuable journeys: → Using open-ended questions and a product like Helio, identify key touchpoints, pain points, and decision-making moments within each journey. → Determine the most valuable touchpoints based on the intersection frequency and user feedback. → Create structured lists with closed answer sets and retest with multiple-choice questions to get stronger signals. → Represent these intersections as key touchpoints that indicate where users commonly interact with your product or service. → Focus on these touchpoints for further testing and optimization. Generalizing the linear flow can be practical once you have gone through this process. It helps tell the story of where users need the most support or attention, making it a helpful tool for stakeholders. Using these techniques, we’ve seen engagement nearly double on websites we support. #productdesign #productdiscovery #userresearch #uxresearch

Confession time: Outside-in thinking is a lot harder to maintain than it seems. Even for those of us in Customer Success. The tendency is always to drift toward inside-out thinking, making our processes and focus company-centric rather than customer-centric. Don't believe me? Just look at one example of this: Customer Journeys. Many teams say that they have a defined Customer Journey. But rather than actually being oriented around the customer, for many the journey map is a list of activities from the company's perspective that are built around milestones the company cares about (contract signature, go-live, renewal, etc). I know about this, because I've been guilty of it in the past myself. I confuse my activity list with a customer journey and wonder why customers aren't as successful as they'd like. While important, that isn't a customer journey. It's an activity list. It's a rut none of us mean to fall into, but it's the natural drift because we live and breathe our own organization. So what do you do about it? How can you adopt a more customer-centric mindset in this area? TRY THIS APPROACH INSTEAD: 1. List out the stages your customers' business goes through at each phase of their experience with your product. Use these to categorize journey stage, rather than your contract lifecycle. 2. For each stage, list out what their experiences, expectations, and activities should be to get the results they want. Don't focus on listing what YOU do, but rather focus on listing what a customer does at each phase of their business with your product. List out the challenges they'd face, the business benefits they'd experience, the change management they'd have to go through, the usage they'd expect. Think bigger than your product here. 3. Then map what support a customer would need to actually accomplish these desired outcomes at each stage of the journey. Think education, change management enablement, training, etc. 4. Based on all of the above, you're finally ready to start identifying what your teams do to support the customer. ____________________________________________ A process like this helps build customer-centricity in 3 ways: 1. Customers stay the center of how you decide which activities are most important to focus on. 2. It empowers your team to become prescriptive about what customers should be doing for THEIR success. 3. It exposes what you don't know about your customers' business. And if you don't know something, just ask them. Don't make assumptions when you can talk to customers directly. Avoid the company-centric drift, fight to maintain true customer-centricity however you can. This isn't just a nice to have in 2025 . It's a business imperative. That kind of outside-in thinking is what causes you to focus on customers' success instead of just Customer Success (love that turn of phrase from Dave J.). But I want to hear from you! How do you guard your org from drifting to inside-out, company-centricity?

Creating an effective customer journey map requires more than just plotting touchpoints—it needs to connect customer actions to business outcomes at every stage. 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘀: 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝘂𝘆𝗲𝗿'𝘀 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲. Notice how the template starts with "Journey Steps" and then "Goal." This order matters. You'll first need to understand where your customer is in their decision-making process before deciding what they are trying to accomplish. 𝗠𝗮𝗽 𝗯𝗼𝘁𝗵 𝗲𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱𝘀. The "Needs and Pains" and "Customer Feeling" sections are crucial. By documenting both rational needs and emotional states, you create content that resonates on multiple levels. 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗛𝘂𝗯𝗦𝗽𝗼𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘆𝗰𝗹𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲𝘀. The journey map directly aligns with HubSpot's lifecycle stages: Subscriber → Lead → MQL → SQL → Opportunity → Customer. This alignment ensures your marketing automation, lead scoring, and reporting are synchronized with the actual customer journey. 𝗗𝗼𝗰𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝘁 𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲. Look at how the template captures specific actions, such as "Completes Lead Gen Form," "Expresses interest via cold call," and "Stops responding to outreach." These detailed behaviors provide clarity on what happens during transitions. 𝗔𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗼𝘄𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽. The "Process ownership" row clearly defines which team or role is responsible at each stage—from Marketing to Account Manager to Division Manager. This accountability prevents leads from falling through the cracks during handoffs. 𝗜𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗳𝘆 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 𝗲𝗻𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲. The "Technology & Tools" row shows exactly which systems power each customer interaction. For awareness, it might be your SEO tools and ad platforms. For consideration, your webinar platform and HubSpot landing pages. For decision, your quote tool and contract management system. 𝗗𝗲𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗰𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝘀𝘂𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗰𝘀. The bottom section establishes concrete metrics for measuring success at each stage. This transforms abstract concepts, like "engagement," into measurable behaviors that you can track in HubSpot. 𝗜𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗽𝘀: 1. Gather stakeholders from marketing, sales, customer success, and product 2. Start with blank sticky notes and the framework above 3. Map the current state first, then the ideal state 4. Identify the most significant gaps between the current and ideal 5. Prioritize changes based on customer impact and implementation effort The goal isn't to create another pretty diagram—it's to build an actionable blueprint that improves both customer experience and business outcomes. #hubspot #crm #ops  

Before meeting Georgiana Laudi, I wasn't a fan of customer experience mapping. It sounded...arts-and-crafts-y. Turns out, I just didn't know how to apply CX maps to get their value. 3 reasons I've changed my mind: ⬇️ 1) A CX map gives your team key context that typical buyer journey maps don't. Traditional buyer journey maps shoehorn all customers' experience into a generic set of buckets: consider/evaluate/buy, regardless of your product, industry, pricing model, or problem you solve. These traditional buyer journey maps flatten all the smaller steps your customer ACTUALLY goes through. With this critical context lost, it’s hard for your team to know where your opportunities for growth are. Done correctly (ie based on customer research), a CX map reveals the nuances in YOUR customer's unique journey. When your team can see & understand those nuances, they're better enabled to spot growth opportunities. 2) A CX map helps you make "customer value" quantifiable, unambiguous, and trackable. If each stage of your CX map = a step your customer takes in their journey, then you need KPIs that represent your customer getting enough value at each stage to move to the next. Moving away from generic KPIs, toward KPIs that represent your customer getting value, is where the magic happens. Example: daily active users. For many products, DAU has nothing to do with the customer getting value from the product. Consider Wistia, a SaaS video hosting company (that Forget The Funnel is a customer of :) The value we get from Wistia is understanding how our audience interacts with our videos. Logging into Wistia is not inherently valuable - in fact, I only log in once every few months, yet we've been happily paying for years. If Wistia measured customer engagement by DAU, their team would be incentivized to constantly nudge me into the product. But imagine how annoying it would be to get “Don’t forget to log in!” emails...when you have no reason to. Once you know what your customer values (via your research), you can measure your success based on customers taking actions that indicate they got that value. For Wistia, a more value-aligned metric might be when a customer sees that someone has watched one of their videos for the first time. Or when they view a video engagement report. When you measure your team's performance using KPIs that = customer value, you align your team's success with the customer's success. Your team becomes incentivized to create experiences that deliver value. 3) A CX map SUPERCHARGES new hire onboarding. It helps each hire quickly grok who your ideal customer is & the problem you solve for that customer. This builds empathy, fosters a customer-led mindset from the start, & helps new hires see how their work connects to the CX. #customerledgrowth #forgetthefunnel #cxmap #mindchanged

How to Create a Journey Map for ITSM (Without Losing Your Mind or Your Users) Let’s face it—most ITSM diagrams look like a spaghetti chart married a ticket queue. If you want to stop guessing where your users are frustrated and start fixing what actually matters, a journey map is your new best friend. Here’s how to build one that makes IT look like a hero (not the villain): 1. Pick a Journey That Actually Happens ↳ Password resets, new hire onboarding, broken printer meltdowns. Start with something real, not theoretical. 2. Talk to Users—Not Just IT ↳ Ask them what they expected, what they experienced, and what drove them to curse under their breath. 3. Write Down the Actual Steps (All of Them) ↳ What really happens, not what’s in the SOP. Include email lag, portal confusion, and "calling my cousin in IT." 4. Capture the Pain Points ↳ Highlight friction, frustration, delays, and unnecessary approvals. If a step adds no value, it adds user rage. 5. Add Emotions, Not Just Actions ↳ Mark how users feel at each stage: Confused. Hopeful. Furious. A smiley face where one belongs? Rare. But possible. 6. Visualize the Whole Experience ↳ Build a timeline or flowchart. Make it so clear that even leadership says, “Oh… yeah, that’s not great.” 7. Fix It with Users, Not to Them ↳ Co-create the better experience with feedback loops, pilot changes, and check-ins. 8. Rinse & Repeat ↳ Because once you map one journey, you’ll discover five more that need saving. A few of my favorite resources to help get your journey started: ↳ Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) ↳ Annette Franz, CCXP ↳ Lynn Hunsaker, CCXP Journey Mapping isn’t about perfection. It’s about visibility. You can’t fix what you refuse to see. Have you ever gone through your own IT process as a “test user”? What did you find? (And did you survive?) ♻️ Repost to save someone from another broken ticket loop. 🔔 Follow Bob Roark for more no-fluff ITSM leadership tips.

Climate founders spend hundreds of hours understanding their customers. Yet most of their websites read like everyone else's. Here's why: They've done the research.  Built the product.  Lived in the problem space for years. But somewhere between customer calls and website copy, something gets lost. All that insight ends up scattered. Slack threads.  Call notes.  Memory. It never makes it to the page in a way that lands. This is why we started doing something called Journey Mapping with every new client at What if Design. We map out the customer journey.  With and without their product.  Side by side. We go through the entire journey of the client’s end customer: Trigger.  Research.  Analysis.  Decision.  Action.  Ongoing. As we work through each stage together, something starts happening. Founders begin pointing to specific moments: "Wait, this is where they get stuck." "This is when they realize current solutions don't work." "Oh, we completely change this part of their experience." We capture it all. Structure it. Place each insight at the right stage. And then they see it. Not just their customer's journey. Their entire story. The exact moments their product matters most.  The pain points worth highlighting.  The transformation they create. By the end, everyone on the team is pointing at the same board, seeing the same story. This becomes the blueprint for everything we create together: website copy, pitch decks, sales conversations. PS: Climate founders, what's one customer insight you know deeply but haven't figured out how to communicate on your website yet?

🥪 Service Blueprints From Scratch (https://lnkd.in/dCeutXvu), a neat practical guide on how to turn research insights into a service blueprint, make front stage and back stage visible — and cover roles, processes, systems and data. By Marco Torrente. --- 🔶 1. Painting a Broader Picture To start with, we map the complexity of a system by looking at a broader picture. The real world is complex, contradictory and often riddled with dependencies, undocumented decisions and data flows. So we get together with stakeholders and map across 6 layers: Front stage ⚬ Customer / User ⚬ Experience / Channels Back stage ⚬ Organisation / People ⚬ Performance / Processes ⚬ Assets / Systems ⚬ Data / Information The goal here is to understand and visualize how a service is currently running (at a high level) and what friction points or challenges are involved in delivering that service to a customer. Afterwards, we structure relevant themes according to when they happen in time. --- 🔹 2. Diving Into Details Marco suggests to build the journey by laying out the phases and steps horizontally and the layers vertically. We map customer actions as steps or activities — similar to how we would do it with customer journey maps. However, a journey is never enough because the experience needs to be delivered from the org effectively. So we need to involve the project team to add back stage items (org, performance, systems, data) as they hold deep domain knowledge. It helps understand where and why customers experience friction. --- 🔹 3. Right-to-Left Thinking Personally, I add a different twist to that mapping process. Journey maps often represent ideal user journeys that people should take, but rarely do in practice. There is a lot of complexity and chaos that they hide — from back-and-forth to external factors that influence their decisions. Often many things must happen at the same time, coming all at once, and working together towards the shared goal. As we aim for that goal, we also need to map risks, blockers, opportunities and unknowns. One way to do that is by applying right-to-left (R-L) thinking (also called “backcasting”) to your work: 🚩 Right-to-left → Start from the goal, then move backwards to start. 🎯 Expose complexity → Map a path that maximizes chance of success. 🧱 Map what happens → Known success moments, frequent blockers. 🪜 One step at a time → Always focus on immediate previous step. ❓ Mark unknowns → Flag strong assumptions for research to-do. 🚀 Prioritize work → Choose key blockers/successes to work on next. It takes a lot of grit to change a way of working in organizations. But we can frame your work around the desired outcome and use right-to-left thinking to enforce critical thinking — instead of focusing on 1000s of details that might matter short-term, but won’t make a difference at scale. Details: https://smashed.by/rtl ↓

Not every user drop-off is a design flaw. Sometimes, it’s an emotional misstep in the journey. That’s why product managers need to map more than just flows, they need to map feelings. If your product decisions are based only on funnels and clicks, you're missing the '𝗪𝗵𝘆' behind the '𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁'. That’s where Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) becomes powerful. I’ve put together a 1-page CJM Cheat Sheet to help you:  ✅ Uncover user pain and motivation across touchpoints  ✅ Spot friction and emotional drop-offs  ✅ Align product, design, and GTM teams around real user needs This isn’t just for UX folks. It’s a core skill for PMs who want to ship more human-centered products. Comment 'CJM' below if you want the higher resolution of this cheatsheet. Hope it helps 🙌

💡How To Approach Product Redesign Product redesign is one of the most challenging design activities. Not only can a redesign be expensive and time-consuming, but the outcome of a redesign can be drastically different from what is expected. Here are a few things to keep in mind when planning redesign ✅ Users don't like changes. Once people learn how to use a product, every significant change you introduce, be it a visual (new look) or function change (new interaction patterns), will cause stress because users have to learn how to use an updated product. So, it's important to measure the value you bring by changing things and compare it to the effort (user learning curve). If the user value >> effort, it's okay to redesign. ✅ Explore current user journeys to figure out pain points & prioritize them. Do user journey mapping (https://lnkd.in/dNzt3NxX). It will help you identify areas where users face friction. It's not that rare when friction happens outside of primary user flows. For example, eCommerce platform users might face problems with customer support service (after-purchase experience). This means that the customer support flow should be redesigned rather than the primary user flow. ✅ Build a shared understanding of what you want to achieve and why. Learn stakeholder expectations to find the match between user and business goals. Use Jobs to be Done framework (https://lnkd.in/dZGPZ8kG) to document jobs for which users hire your product. Create a 2x2 Effort-Value matrix that will help you identify low-effort, high-value redesign activities. ✅ Avoid introducing sudden changes. The worst thing that you can do is to change the look and feel of your product overnight without notifying users about it. One interesting case is eBay's failure with the "yellow background" redesign (https://lnkd.in/dbVRyPqd). Always prefer incremental changes over a major update. ✅ Give users control over when a change affects them. For example, if you release a new look and feel of your product, keep the old theme for some time and allow the users to switch to it if they prefer to use the old theme. By doing that, you won't interrupt user workflow and help them learn the system at the pace that works for them. ✅ Highlight new things to users. If you introduce any change to the default way users interact with your product (i.e., change the location of primary functional controls), highlight it to returning users so that they can easily learn where they can find key UI elements. 🖼 How to redesign product by Taras Bakusevych (https://lnkd.in/d6RheYBr) #UI #userinterface #uidesign #productdesing #design #uxdesign #userexperience