At its core, service design, and therefore journey management, is an iterative and explorative process. It involves core activities: research to understand people and their behavior, ideation to generate ideas, prototyping to explore and test concepts, and implementation to launch and roll out offerings. This iterative nature means the process is not linear. While you can prepare for activities, you cannot plan with precision beforehand, requiring adaptation as you go.
Journey maps are highlighted as fundamental tools in this process. They serve to visualize the service or experience as a sequence of interrelated actions over time and across different touchpoints. Journey maps are the foundation for all journey management, and need to be validated with research and data.
Embedding service design: the path to governance
Implementing service design across an organization, moving beyond individual projects to enterprise-wide customer journey management, presents challenges. Organizations often have existing structures, processes, and leadership approaches that are product-centric or siloed. Integrating a human-centered, collaborative, and iterative approach requires strategic effort.
Embedding service design, which is a key aspect of establishing a governance structure for journey management, involves several steps:
- Finding 'your' way of doing service design by adapting processes, tools, methods, and language to the specific organizational context.
- Gaining management buy-in and raising awareness through documenting successful projects and their measurable impact. Leadership needs to develop trust in the open and fast approach.
- Building proficiency within the organization.
As service design efforts scale, particularly in managing multiple projects across different departments simultaneously, new complexities arise. A significant challenge is that different teams may develop their own distinct ways of working, terminology, and tool usage, potentially leading to new silos within the service design practice itself. This necessitates creating a common understanding, terminology and responsibilities.
Build a team for customer journey management
For larger organizations / enterprises it's recommended to build a core project team. It helps preserve the flow of empathy and avoids handovers between research and implementation. A journey management council is a group of people who collaborate on the customer journey, who share opinions and discuss different perspectives.
The most important roles in a journey management council are the following:
The lead / sponsor: Responsible for strategic implementation and organizational support
The manager: Responsible for operations: scheduling meetings, follow-through decisions, bridging silos
The coordinator: Responsible for regularly updating one specific sub-journey with the most recent data and decisions
The supporter: Supporting coordinators in collecting information, in many cases representing different departments
What is a customer journey manager?
The most common role is the customer journey manager. They are responsible for coordination of the current-state journey, as well as developing it towards the future-state journey. The person is an evangelist for journey mapping as part of strategic business planning: what’s the status of the product or service, what’s the vision and how to align customer goals with business goals?.
The job of the customer journey managers comes in all forms, with many different titles and skill sets. You might also read about customer journey coordinators, customer experience managers, journey owners, and many more.
The tasks a customer journey manager takes care of are multitude:
- Helping to shape the product vision along future-state journey maps
- Researching customer needs and adapting the current-state journeys accordingly
- Managing stakeholders
- Managing the current-state journey, keeping in mind and approaching the future state
- Managing and facilitating interactive sessions, like co-creative workshops, or research and prototyping sessions
Common customer journey manager skills to be found in job descriptions are:
- A strong understanding of service design, including the methods and techniques like journey mapping and systems thinking
- Customer-focused
- Strong analytical skills
- Strong social competences that help with collaboration
- Strong presentation skills
- An academic background, or specific education appears to be a nice-to-have, more than a strict requirement
Looking at job portals, you will see that the described skill set of the customer journey manager’s job is everything but streamlined.
The management structure: Bringing it together
On the one hand focusing on the principles, process, and embedding of service design is crucial. This highlights the need for managing the service design process and sustainably integrating it into the organization. Planning, managing expectations, adapting the process, and maintaining consistency are important.
These elements provide the necessary activities and principles for managing service design work across an organization. Establishing a formal governance structure for journey management builds upon these fundamentals by defining how these activities are coordinated, how decisions are made, and who is responsible.
A governance structure often includes:
- A hierarchy of journey maps that acts as a "zoomable dashboard"
- Clear ownership and responsibility for maintaining maps and driving initiatives
- An established rhythm for reviewing and updating journey work
- Connecting journey maps with qualitative and quantitative data, such as KPIs to monitor performance. Metrics are one of the most crucial additions on journey maps to get buy-in from management.
- Structured decision-making processes informed by insights from journey work
Summary
In essence, a formal governance structure for journey management provides the organizational scaffolding – the specific roles, rhythms, and standards – needed to sustain, scale, and manage this practice as a strategic capability within the organization, ensuring journey management translates into continuous improvement and tangible impact. It moves the organization from doing service design in projects to living service design as a management approach.
