Customer journey mapping to get the big picture

Welcome to the Product Bakery. As the last two Mondays, I'm today here with my co-host Alex, and we're discussing a top of mind topic again. Hi, Alex. Hi, Christian. So before we start into the conversation, as always, a quick reminder to our social media, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, feel free to follow us, give us a like. And in case you like this conversation, we would really appreciate if you help us growing our audience and sharing it with your network, with your friends, with your family, whoever could be interested in the Product Bakery podcast. So Alex, you know how passionate I am about user story mapping, but we also know next to that, there's something called... I guess everyone knows. I think it's like one of the most discussed topics in this podcast. I do feel like a lot of, I got so many people referring back to the sessions on user story mapping. But it drops also not only in those particular conversations. So we talk to Luca and to other people and they're always coming back to user story mapping, but today it's not about that. Today it's about the counterpart, which is customer journey mapping. And based on your experience as design head and designer, and also working at Bain where I remember you have done this gazillions of times, I would be interested in what it is about. What it is about. In general, I think user journey mapping is really a good way of, let's say, synthesizing and making sense also of research and putting it in a format that's easy to consume for different stakeholders, for different people involved in the company to first of all, showcase the whole holistic product, and then also combine it with the different user needs and sentiments and so on over time. So usually it starts with research, right? You need to talk to your users. You need to have real insights. You need to know how users do certain things, how they feel when doing certain things, like what are different pain points? Also, what are different workarounds? Because you can have a user journey map for a product that you want to build. So you're not like mapping out the experience that the user has with a specific product itself, but maybe while trying to achieve something or while solving a job to be done, for example. So you do the user research, and then you try to really map all the different stages. And you try to combine it with what does the user do? How does the user feel? Sometimes also you can add the aspect of the system. What does the system do? And at the end, it gives you this really big holistic map where you see all the different parts where the user interacts with something. And this can help you then identify where are big pain points. Where can you, for example, try to solve some of these pain points by adding different features or by adding, for example, a product and so on, and then work around it. So just to summarize it, it sounds like that vertically you list all the actions, emotions, and feelings a customer have. And then on the horizontal line, you describe all the touch points the customer have with the product and the company. Is that correct? Yeah. I think you can look at it almost as a timeline, right? So you have all the different steps. You could even put some sort of phases or bigger journeys above. We can look at a product from the beginning of acquisition. And then in acquisition, you have initially, how do people find it? How do they get their information? So the whole consideration aspect, how do they take the decision, and so on. And you really have this timeline. And then on the vertical axis, as you say, we always talk in frameworks and models, you have what are the activities that they do? How do they feel about them? So what are the emotions when it comes to taking a decision, for example, for a product? And you are entering your credit card. You have different emotions. You might have emotions also of fear. Can I trust this company or not? And so you also try to lay out these emotional aspects, because I think this is very helpful also for whoever designer, engineer, manager, and so on is involved in building new products and new features to keep this in mind. And I think it helps you also give the whole journey and personality. Yeah. And whenever I use my credit card, I'm just crying. So just that you know how I feel. Yeah, I can imagine. I do that a lot. But coming back to it, I like the summary. But there's one more thing that I would like to better understand, because you mentioned with a customer journey map, you can understand what job the customer or the user wants to get done. And that brings me to the question of, when should I use a user journey map or a customer journey map? And why would I do that instead of classic research and market research and just coming up with a list of things? I think what I mentioned at the beginning is that really just ties to different stages of the product. You can do research before even having a product in mind. It can really be like on the ideation kind of phase. Or you can do it with a product in mind that you want to improve the product or you are extending it with some functionality and so on. And I do think it's an output format for research. I think that's a good way of phrasing it, because you talk to the user. You have a ton of user interviews being made and so on. And obviously, that's a lot of information. By mapping it on the journey, this helps you also really synthesize it in an easy way and to put it in a format where people can look at it and easily understand it and grasp it. So they understand what happens on the different steps. Why do people perform certain actions? How do they perform certain actions? What are they doing? And so on. And yeah, I think it's just a good way of synthesizing and sense-making of the information that you gather in user research. Yeah, it's definitely a good aggregator of all the information that you got from the different places and the different pieces and tie them together into one map that looks at a certain topic more holistically, right? Yeah, I totally got that. I haven't done as many customer journey maps as you, but I'm always a big fan of trying to do it as early as possible. Because the earlier you start mapping out the journey, the easier you understand what the customer is interacting, how the customer's interacting, and what problems you can then better derive out of that and trying to solve. We talked also about user story mapping. To just bring everyone up to speed, a user story map focuses on a particular solution and describes how a customer will use a solution in the future and mapping it out based on its activities and steps and user stories. I would like to discuss with you, where do you see the key differentiators and what would you do first if you would have the choice for an existing product, for example? Yeah, so I think, as you said, user customer story map should be done very early. It should be like really one of the first things that you do. You mean the journey map? The journey map. The customer journey map, yeah, the journey map. It's a user journey, customer journey map. It should be like really one of the early things, right? Because you try to understand the whole problem space better or the whole interaction better and so on. And I think it's very helpful information to then figure out where is potential, like where can we improve something, where can we build certain new features and so on. And I think when it then comes to the product development itself, that's where the user story map comes in very handy, right? Because then we talk about, okay, we know where we have like certain pain points, we know where we need to build something. And then you try to break down the experience and formulate the different stories that are also then important for the prioritization, for the whole scoping also of the project, and for also understanding what it takes for the individual step that the user performs in terms of on a product level and on a user story level to build that. And alternatively, the user story map can be also used to create a prototype out of that, that you're then going to research again to validate whether it's a good solution or not. So I really like it. And I think we're touching here, the product discovery in itself. So the product discovery process can be quite big and quite long. And the customer journey map, as well as the user story maps are both part of it. But in most of the times, and I've changed my mind a little bit, I realized that the customer journey map gives you much more insights and makes the whole process of developing or defining a user story map much easier and much faster. Yeah, yeah, because how they do things, where the problems are, and so on. And then you take this as input. And that's what I'm saying. For me, it's two weeks ago, we talked about Double Diamond. To me, it's like this very first phase, we were talking about you go wide, you have research, you have a lot of like information. And then like also in the first, like converging, you try to make sense out of it. So you lay out the whole journey, you find the pain points, you uncover the different needs, figure out like how you can optimize it, where people need support, and so on. And then you come up with some ideas. And whenever we then talk about like the idea that we have, and when it comes more like, into how do we execute on this, I think that's then where the user story map comes in very handy. Nevertheless, I always feel like it's two formats that can easily be combined, like it's really something where if you have a user story map, why not combining it with the initial journey map and show also the different insights that we have on an emotional level, on the different faces and touch points and interactions with the user to extend the whole framework, and to then like really look at holistic map that can be helpful for everyone involved in the process. And that can then even be like broken down in user stories for development. So I don't think like, they should live in isolation. I think they can get very complex if we try to combine them too much, because also of the amount of steps and stories that you might show on a user story map. But I think you can combine them and you should use them in combination to build a good product. And you should always keep in mind, what problem do you want to solve with either of them, right? With the customer journey map, you want to understand what the customer is doing and you want to map out the pain points. With the user story map, you want to map out a solution. I think that's very important to remind. And now where you shared the possibility to combine those and doing this in parallel, people might say that's shit loads of work. My feedback here is because I'm hearing this many times and that's why I picked up this conversation and this topic for today. It's not that much. I think the biggest problem is that people want to make it too perfect because they haven't researched enough. They need more information. They need developers who join the meetings, et cetera. My point on that is, you are right on one hand. On the other hand, it's also a quote that I love using, is the bad plan is better than no plan, right? And the good plan executed now is better than a perfect plan executed in two weeks. So take what you have, sit down with your product team, with your designer, with your product manager, and even a developer or whoever you need. Within two or three sessions, two hours, you can already create the output of having a rough customer journey map, as well as a rough user story map. It doesn't need to be perfect, but the insights you gather, the ideas that you will create will be amazing. It's much better than just talking about it and not writing anything down. That's my point, but I'm happy to hear what your tips are for people who want to do both. I think, as you say, I think the biggest enemy in general of professionals is perfectionism, right? If you try to make this perfect thing, it often happens that you never really start. And I think user story map and the user journey map, they can all be living documents, and you can, over time, add to it, change things. You will launch new features. So you will have like new data points from customers that you can add to the user journey. The user journey might change based on certain features that you've built. The user story map also needs to reflect the things that you need to build. Okay, everything that's live, you can already move it out. And then you only keep in the new stars. But those are all living documents. I think in product development, there is no static, this is it, right? The product is also never done. It's normal that it will evolve. And I think having a certain level of pragmatism, starting with a pragmatic approach brings you much further, because, okay, maybe it's not perfect, but you have the information and you're working user centric, and you are keeping user in mind. And that's better than not doing it. So yeah, I would say, have a poor user journey at the beginning and extend it rather than not having it. Couldn't agree more. Cool, Alex. Yeah, thank you very much for this chat. And Alex, and I would love to know from you, what is stopping you from doing both at the same time? Let us know on social media, we're gonna make an Instagram post today. And we would appreciate to hear your feedback, as well as a click on the follow button. Amazing. Christian, was great seeing you, was great talking to you. And have a good night. You too. Bye bye. Bye bye.