Journey Mapping - What the Guides Won’t Tell You
Customer journey maps are a popular approach to empathize with your customers and visualize areas of opportunity. The benefits are tenfold when you can create one as a team. First, you get the harness the collective knowledge of folks closest to the customer problem. Second, it creates a shared understanding of the customer journey the team can bring with them to problem solve in other contexts. However, making a customer journey map collaboratively can be challenging. From leading over 10 teams through the process, I noticed patterns in where teams get stuck. Here are my in-session facilitator tips for a productive customer journey mapping session.
Tips
Keep a close eye on the granularity of the steps, assume people will get too detailed. Capture the major steps needed to move through the journey. Be ready to ask, What is this step trying to accomplish or How can I summarize that?
Timebox to something reasonable or you’ll go into too much unneeded details. Rough guidance, 30-90mins.
Be prepared to guess a step or two to model what you are looking for and get the team flowing. Don’t worry if you are wrong, you can come back and change the steps later.
Each person has a slightly different lens on the journey, usually influenced by their role on the team. Once you get going, I have found people are eager to share their knowledge. The catch is it will be with the context they know which can be on any point in the map. As a facilitator this means people telling you steps on the journey, but not in a logical order. When this happens:
Ask, Does this occur after or before [another established point on the map]?
Capture it and be ready to revise after you capture something. Move around, repeat.
Keep people focused on one step at a time. Ask, What is the very next step that occurs after this? Is a prompt I used a lot.
Remember, it is a current state map, not a future state! I get asked this multiple times, without fail.
The middle is messy, that is okay, it doesn’t need to be perfect. Try to get it to the “good enough” or “most of the time” state. Consider the map a living artifact you can update as you learn more.
