Journey maps have long been the go-to tool for uncovering customer pain points, those moments of frustration, confusion, or unmet needs that stand between a user and their goals. These pain points are invaluable for sparking improvements. But if we only focus on what’s broken, we miss a vital part of the story: the things that are already working well.
With the new ability to create additional portfolio card types in Smaply, beyond the traditional pain point, opportunity, and solution cards, we have a chance to broaden the scope of insight capture, to create strategies from product visions, to create lasting competitive advantages. This feature opens the door to a new, essential artefact in customer-centric work: the bright spot card.
Why bright spots deserve a place on the map
A bright spot is a moment in the customer journey where expectations are not just met, but exceeded. It’s where delight happens, often quietly, without formal recognition. These are the micro-moments or standout features that make people say, “That was better than I expected.”
While pain points push teams to fix, bright spots guide teams on what to preserve and scale. They show what customers already love and where the brand naturally shines. Ignoring these moments doesn’t just waste potential; it opens the door for competitors to catch up.
- Competitive Edge
It highlights positive differentiation from competitors by surfacing unique moments in the journey where the experience clearly exceeds industry norms. These are not just marginal improvements but standout interactions that leave a lasting impression and shape how the brand is perceived. - Future Expectations
It signals elements that may shift from a delighter to an expectation, offering teams a way to track that evolution. This allows organizations to adapt as customer standards rise proactively, rather than reacting once delight fades into an assumed baseline. - Strategic Leverage
It functions as a strategic asset rather than a simple UX observation. By linking directly to brand positioning, loyalty indicators, or business priorities, it ensures the moment is treated with the significance it deserves across functions. - Emotional Impact
It captures emotional resonance by identifying moments when customers feel genuinely seen, supported, or surprised. These highs often correspond with peaks in the emotional journey and can become anchors of brand memory. - Cultural Signal
It reflects internal strengths such as aligned culture, empowered teams, or streamlined operations that show up as unexpectedly positive external experiences. Bright spots are often the visible outcome of invisible excellence behind the scenes. - Change Protection
It helps clarify what not to change. During transformation or efficiency efforts, bright spot cards can safeguard the elements of the experience that matter most, preventing well-intentioned changes from undermining what customers already love.
As organizations mature in their journey management practice, the types of insights they can act upon evolve. In the early stages, much of the work focuses on identifying and resolving pain points, focusing on what’s broken or underperforming. That’s a vital first step. But as governance models stabilize, data becomes more reliable, and teams align around shared journeys, the opportunity emerges to include bright spots as another class of insight. These are not an either-or to pain points, but a signal of increasing journey maturity. When a team can track both consistently and understand how they interplay, they move from reactive fixes to strategic experience stewardship.
The Kano Model: A framework for managing delight
The logic behind bright spot cards is deeply rooted in the Kano Model, a framework for product development that classifies customer needs into three categories:
- Basic Needs
Expected. Their absence causes dissatisfaction, but their presence doesn't increase satisfaction. - Performance Needs
They correlate directly with the overall satisfaction: the more of those performance needs are met, the better. - Delighters
These are unexpected features or services that result in high satisfaction. Over time, however, delighters shift to become expected, losing their “wow” factor.
This is where the bright spot card becomes crucial: by surfacing delighters early, teams can track their evolution and plan for their sustainment. Instead of being blindsided when a former strength becomes table stakes, the organization can proactively evolve it.
It’s important to note that bright spots are not simply the inverse of pain points. They are a distinct category of experience signal: moments of emotional resonance, perceived value, and positive differentiation. They show up most clearly in the emotional journey lane of a map, where satisfaction spikes and delight emerges. Tracking these moments alongside pain points enables teams to manage the full emotional arc of a customer journey, identifying not only where things break down but where the experience elevates.
Incentives matter: From backlog to roadmap
Here’s a hard truth in many product organizations:
“People get promoted for roadmap items, not backlog ones.”
In other words, fixing bugs or resolving known issues may be important, but it rarely garners the same visibility or recognition as launching a new feature, enhancement, or “hero” initiative. Unfortunately, this dynamic can cause bright spots to be neglected, the things customers already love. If even they fall into the backlog, they are seen as “done” or “not urgent,” even though they are mission-critical differentiators.
Bright spots shouldn’t merely be captured. They should be woven into the information system that supports journey management. In mature organizations, journey maps become more than just snapshots of experience; they are decision-making tools, living repositories that reflect continuous input from research, analytics, and operational data. In this context, bright spots become strategic signals. By integrating them into the same ecosystem as pain points, KPIs, insights, etc., teams embed them into how roadmap decisions are made. It shifts the organization from managing discrete experiences to orchestrating a holistic system of insights. By integrating bright spots as formal, visible portfolio items, not just buried insights, we:
- Elevate them to roadmap-worthy status
- Give product teams clear justification to invest in them
- Provide leadership with language and evidence to support roadmap decisions
- Align internal incentives with sustaining competitive advantage
A well-articulated bright spot card makes the case: “This moment is not just good, it’s strategic. Let’s protect it, evolve it, and promote it.”
Other frameworks that support the bright spot mindset
While the Kano Model is a powerful base, several other frameworks reinforce the value of surfacing bright spots:
- Jobs to be done (JTBD)
Bright spots often represent jobs that are fulfilled in a manner that not only solves the problem but also delights in the process. Understanding them helps refine and differentiate the value proposition. - Net Promoter System (NPS)
Want to know what turns a customer into a promoter? Look at your bright spots. Tagging them to comments from promoters helps bridge qualitative mapping with quantitative loyalty metrics. - Experience economy (Pine & Gilmore, 1999)
Delighters are key to creating memorable, branded experiences that people talk about and share. Bright spots are the foundation for creating emotional resonance. - Service-Profit Chain
Internal excellence (happy employees, aligned operations) often results in bright spots. Mapping them reinforces the connection between culture and customer impact. - Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
CSAT helps identify specific touchpoints where satisfaction peaks. Bright spots often correlate with high CSAT scores, especially when collected right after an interaction. By connecting bright spots to CSAT data, teams can validate what works and prioritize protecting those high-performing moments.
While each of these frameworks offers a valuable perspective on customer experience, bright spots often emerge as the common thread that ties them together. A single moment of delight may reflect a job well done, generate high Net Promoter Scores, indicate strong internal alignment, and create lasting emotional impact. Treating bright spots as this connecting element brings coherence to otherwise fragmented tools and models, grounding them in tangible, real-world experiences that matter to both customers and the organization.
From insight to action: How to use bright spot cards
Here’s how teams can start incorporating bright spot cards into their journey mapping practice:
- Create a dedicated card type
Label it “Bright Spot” and distinguish it visually in your portfolio. Consider icons like a sparkle, sun, or trophy to signal positive value. - Use Targeted Prompts
In mapping workshops or research synthesis sessions, prompt participants:
- What do customers frequently praise?
- What makes us different (in a good way)?
- Where do customers experience ease, joy, or delight?
- What are we proud of in this journey?
Your customer-facing teams will be the ones who can provide the best insights on this.
- Attach Evidence
Link the bright spot to customer quotes, metrics (NPS, CSAT), or observational insights. The stronger the evidence, the more roadmap-worthy it becomes. - Relate to Personas and Competitors
Highlight which personas value the bright spot most, and whether competitors offer anything comparable. This helps reinforce strategic value. - Connect to the Roadmap
Tag bright spots to existing roadmap items or create new ones that build on their strengths. Remember: keeping something great is just as valuable as fixing something broken. And often it’s much cheaper than working on entirely new delights only.
Designing research to detect bright spots
Capturing bright spots isn’t just about mapping; it's about identifying and leveraging them. It starts upstream, in the way we conduct customer research. Most research naturally gravitates toward uncovering problems: interviews center around pain points, surveys ask what’s not working, and support channels document complaints. As a result, positive moments often go unspoken, not because they don’t exist, but because customers aren’t typically prompted to surface them.
This makes it crucial for organizations to design research that intentionally invites praise and positivity, not just critique. Adding simple prompts like “What was unexpectedly great?” or “Which part of the experience surprised you in a good way?” can uncover valuable insights. Furthermore, incentivizing this kind of feedback, whether through rewards, recognition, or even just acknowledgment, can help balance the feedback loop. Otherwise, bright spots remain invisible. Not because they don’t matter, but because we forget to ask.
Beyond prompting for positivity, organizations should look at rebalancing their entire research infrastructure. This involves allocating resources to track moments of delight with the same rigor typically reserved for issues and complaints. Teams might introduce dashboards that highlight experiential highs, redesign feedback loops to elevate moments of praise, or designate specific roles responsible for maintaining standout experiences. When recognition of what works becomes built into the system, bright spots move from isolated observations to enduring sources of value and insight.
