Ending the need for multi-million dollar transformations

In a tough market, where every company is rethinking their bottom-line, we’re raising $34M to fund the future of the journey-centric business. And from today, we are adding unlimited users to all plans. 

I think for years, we’ve had it backwards. To really democratize journey-centricity you should not be constrained by limiting access.

We’re very grateful to have Blossom doubling down, and to have our existing investors, Arches Capital and InnovationQuarter, join the round, as well. But also welcoming new partners like HighSage, 20Sales and CX evangelist Steven van Belleghem to the journey. The future of Journey Management looks bright. 

But before we dig in, let’s zoom out and see what’s going on in the world right now.

The evolution of customer-centricity

Throughout history, businesses have constantly reinvented themselves—some by accident rather than plan and too often as a belated response to a dramatic shift in their key market. Going back 100 years the then-new 1924 Ford Model T represented a belated shift in focus, from the original 1908 launch mantra of “you can have any color as long as it is black!” Henry Ford was undoubtedly an innovator and father of the modern production line. His inside-out focus built the car and created the market for everyone else. However, over the following years, he failed to listen to the customers and react to how the market he created was moving in a new direction. Customers were not only demanding a roof, doors and windows, they were voting with their wallets. Ford's market share went from more than 70% to less than 10% in a decade—this was Ford’s first transformation.

Almost 75 years ago when Peter Drucker published his seminal title “The Practice of Management,” he documented how customers will decide what a business is, and also how it is successful. To his words: “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.” Drucker went on: “so therefore the business has 2 functions: marketing and innovation.” This was the 1950’s. He didn’t see the digital transformation coming. 

Now, we also have CX, Product, Research, Design, Digital Services, Operations, and many other departments—all trying their best to be customer-centric. The problem is that while most organizations have identified the various journeys that customers can take as they interact with the business, the decisions are siloed within different departments. The owners of each step focus only on the scope they control, with little or no regard for the impact it might have further on. It is little surprise that research points to 80% of organizations believing they are customer-centric, yet only 8% of their consumers agree.

The pitfalls of traditional transformation approaches

Today there are multi-million dollar consultancies that have created machines to advise and run transformational projects. Before we started TheyDo, Martin, Charles and I had 50 years of experience between us, running customer-centric transformation projects for large enterprises. 

We evolved our version of the Triple Diamond framework for problem discovery, solution discovery and then solution delivery. The rush from the energy generated when you help a company plot a new path forward from research and discovery, through brainstorming sessions to alignment on new processes and goals is real. However, the crash would inevitably come months later when the company would call us back in to rerun the exercise all over again. Because while everyone high-fived and fist-bumped over the journey map that had been created, once the contributors left the room, they all went back to chasing their siloed KPIs.These companies needed a way to escape the transformation trap—where solutions have been identified but fail to align the various journeys, metrics and people required to ensure success.

Overcoming the transformation trap

We realized that we were part of the problem. From adopting Agile methodologies, Service Design, Six Sigma and even OKRs, to digital versions of whiteboards and post-its, like Figma and Miro, the problem was they all created static journeys that required manual updating and were not linked to the way of working—let alone the data needed to complete the picture. 

While in the moment the journey map represented the path forward, within minutes it was forgotten.

So customer-centricity was impossible to achieve. Often, the only centricity in the organization were the circles everyone ran around in while using different tools, methodologies and unique views on what the business needed and their customer journey perspective.

So when we launched the first version of TheyDo (on a Wordpress backend), the response was amazing. But when TheyDo took off in 2022, overcoming the transformation trap for our customers, we also realized it was the beginning of a shift in the market.

The journey-centric movement

Today, TheyDo is used globally at brands such as Cisco, Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Home Depot, and Polestar. They represent companies that are starting to use the journey as a way to manage innovation and growth within their businesses. 

We are seeing the rise of the journey-centric organization, in which there is one integrated and connected view across the business. This includes the way employees, customers, and partners interact and the resulting impact. Doing more with less is more important than ever. It becomes a shared framework that cascades down from the C-suite to individual contributors, all able to see how their often perceived “little role” has a big impact on the customer's happiness and the business's overall success. 

Today's exciting news is that our most recent funding round enables us to invest in our growing community of journey-centric leaders. Help them grow, but also for us as a company to develop new markets, and democratize the journey-centric movement. 

But it also enables us to invest in expanding our Triple diamond framework, how-to guides, and knowledge. We’re on the verge of launching our Academy, and—as we’ve made mapping free of charge—double down on this strategy. Journey-first thinking should be open source and available to every business, free of charge. This allows even a small team adopting this approach to change how their business thinks and start the path to journey-centricity.

The biggest barrier to change is the communication of new ideas and information far and wide across the organization. Therefore, we decided to make all users free. 

Because in the end, journeys are the most powerful business tool there is. And we think you should pay for tools, not your employees. The most repeated line on quarterly business reviews is “We wouldn’t have discovered that without understanding the data in context of the journey”.

So with this funding, we’re calling it time to end the transformation trap, the needlessly repeated multi-million dollar projects it fuels, and to embark on a new way of working. Journey-centricity is a simple idea, but can seem to be hard to achieve. Join us on our mission to make the journey the most powerful business tool there is. 

Why not take the first simple step on this path and begin with our journey maturity scan? It only takes a few minutes to know where you stand.