Journey Management Mastery #02

This second Journey Management Mastery episode talks about the big gap between introducing process and a journey-driven workflow. 

Industry movers and shakers

Before diving into the latest extracts from the Journey Management index, we shared some examples of what some of the movers and shakers in various industries are up to. 

Airbnb: Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, announced the company's focus on customer-centricity by acknowledging Airbnb’s ambition of improving their end-to-end service. Alongside being an example of service design on fire, this ultimately shows how what you really need to have to make Journey Management happen is someone in your leadership team, like the CEO, to back it up. 

Spotify: They published a behind-the-scenes look at service design at Spotify. This could be considered a blueprint or manifesto for other in-house service design teams that need to help the rest of the organization see the value of service design and how it can truly impact the business on a larger scale.

Leah Tharin on LinkedIn: See this PLG, Product, Growth Advisor's post about how growth teams are trying to make organizations revolve around end-to-end journeys, putting the user or customer in the center and organizing around that. She discusses the move away from matrix organizations to cross-functional teams and the fact that the industry has to be ready to have the customer journey reflect organizational constructs, not functions. In other words, reorganizing teams in line with the customer journey. 

New Journey Management index insights

Moving on with the latest results, we saw that the average maturity level of an organization is 2.5. Furthermore, the largest gap is going from Level 2 (Process) to Level 3 (Journey-driven workflow). The big question is: why is that jump so hard for most organizations? 

Jochem broke it down nicely: “After the intuition stage where journeys are all over the place, you start to introduce the process – standardizing everything so everyone starts every project with a journey. The next stage is a journey-driven workflow where you actually start doing what we saw Airbnb and Spotify doing, and what Leah was talking about in her LinkedIn post. You start to put the journey in the center and work around it, seeing the opportunities and the insights, and who is doing what.

“This part is really hard because everyone has a different idea of Journeys and how to work with them. If you look at roadmaps, product backlogs, even how marketing works with campaigns, the terminology, structure, research, and the steps teams take to actually work with journeys differs. You’re doing the same thing, but still effectively talking apples and pears. This is what requires that first step into an organization aspect of it”.

quote

The steps teams take to actually work with journeys differs. You’re doing the same thing, but still talking apples and pears.

Jochem van der Veer

Co-founder and CEO of TheyDo

How do you overcome this?

Jochem outlined three main things that organizations can do to overcome this gap from process to a journey-driven workflow.

1. Having an umbrella is great, but don’t try to shoehorn everyone into the same framework 

2. Focus on aligning teams on opportunities you see (using them as a basis for comparison across teams)

3. Introduce rituals within your company to make this possible (maybe cross-functional meetings to figure out the solutions together, or discuss prioritization of bigger concepts on a quarterly basis).

 Rather than trying to make sure that marketing speaks product Journey or product speaks marketing Journey, we introduce another abstraction layer of opportunities which is more universal than trying to get everyone to speak the same journey language. These things are not so obvious, but together they bridge the gap.