One journey map is manageable. Ten becomes a coordination problem. Fifty becomes chaos.
As organizations mature in their journey work, they accumulate maps. Marketing maps acquisition. Product maps onboarding. Support maps service recovery. Each team produces useful work in isolation, but nobody connects the pieces. The result is a growing collection of maps in different formats, at different levels of detail, with overlapping coverage and no shared structure. Managing multiple customer journeys is the discipline of organizing these maps into a system that works together, rather than a pile of disconnected artifacts. You need three things to make it work: a hierarchy that creates structure, connections that link related maps, and governance that scales.
Why multiple journey maps become unmanageable
The problem rarely starts with bad maps. It starts with no system for organizing them.
Every team maps what they can see. Marketing creates an acquisition journey. Product maps the onboarding flow. Customer success maps the renewal experience. Each map is useful within its team, but across the organization, five predictable problems emerge.
Duplication. Multiple teams map the same touchpoints independently. The support team's journey and the product team's journey both include the help center, but they describe it differently. Nobody knows which version to trust.
Inconsistency. Different teams use different formats, terminology, and levels of detail. One map has 12 stages. Another has 40 steps. Comparing them is like comparing a city map to a floor plan.
Orphan maps. Maps created for a workshop or a specific project that were never maintained, never connected to other work, and never retired. They sit in shared drives, eroding confidence in journey work overall. When leadership encounters a stale map, they question whether any map is current.
Missing connections. Each map shows a fragment of the customer experience, but nobody sees how fragments connect. The handoff between sales and onboarding, the transition from trial to paid, the escalation from self-service to human support. These seams are where experience often breaks down, and they live between maps, not within them.
No prioritization. With dozens of maps, it's unclear which journeys deserve investment. Teams improve the journeys they own, not necessarily the journeys that matter most to the customer or the business.
The net effect: leadership can't use journey work for strategic decisions because the maps don't add up to a coherent view. The solution isn't fewer maps. It's better structure.
A three-level journey hierarchy
Think of journey maps like a mapping application. You need to zoom out for the big picture and zoom in for detail, with clear levels in between. A three-level hierarchy gives you that structure.
L1 is the backbone. It shows the full customer lifecycle in broad stages. Every other map connects to it. When a leader asks "what does our customer experience look like?", L1 is the answer. It carries high-level metrics, key pain points, and strategic priorities. One organization typically needs one to three L1 maps (one per major customer segment or product line).
L2 is where most improvement work happens. Each L2 journey maps to a stage in the L1 lifecycle. "First-time onboarding" sits under the Onboarding stage. "Filing a support ticket" sits under Usage. L2 journeys are detailed enough to identify pain points and opportunities, but scoped enough that a cross-functional team can own one. An organization might have 10 to 30 L2 journeys.
L3 is for deep dives. Not every L2 journey needs L3 maps. Create them when a specific interaction requires detailed analysis, like optimizing a checkout flow or redesigning a signup process. L3 maps connect to specific steps within their parent L2 journey.
The hierarchy creates natural connections. Every L2 maps to an L1 stage. Every L3 maps to an L2 step. You can zoom from lifecycle to micro-moment without losing context, and you always know where a map fits in the bigger picture.
Not every organization needs all three levels immediately. Start with L1 and a handful of L2 journeys for your highest-priority experiences. Add L3 detail only where it drives better decisions.
Organizing journeys beyond hierarchy
Hierarchy gives you vertical structure, zoom levels from broad to detailed. You also need horizontal organization: a way to categorize and find journeys across the portfolio.
Most organizations need one primary categorization, often lifecycle stage or persona, supplemented by tags for secondary dimensions. A journey might primarily be categorized under "Onboarding" (lifecycle stage) but also tagged with "Enterprise" (persona) and "Mobile" (channel).
The goal is findability. When someone needs a journey map, they should locate the right one without asking three people which folder it's in. This is where a journey map repository becomes valuable: a central, organized location where all active maps live, searchable by hierarchy level, category, and tags.
Connecting journeys across the portfolio
Isolated maps show fragments. Connected maps show how experiences flow across touchpoints, handoffs, and organizational boundaries. Three types of connections matter.
Hierarchical links are the connections created by the hierarchy itself. An L2 journey connects to its parent L1 stage. An L3 micro-journey connects to its parent L2 step. These links let you navigate between zoom levels without losing context. Click into an L1 stage and see all the L2 journeys within it. Click into an L2 step and see the L3 detail beneath it.
Handoff links connect sequential journeys. The sales journey hands off to onboarding. Onboarding hands off to ongoing usage. Trial experience hands off to paid experience. These transitions are where experience often breaks down because different teams own each side of the handoff, and neither team sees the full picture. Mapping these connections explicitly makes handoff problems visible and assignable.
Shared touchpoint links connect journeys that pass through the same touchpoint. The contact center appears in the support journey, the billing journey, and the returns journey. The website knowledge base appears in onboarding, self-service support, and pre-purchase research. When you improve a shared touchpoint, the impact cascades across every connected journey.
The practical implication of shared touchpoints is change propagation. When the billing system gets redesigned, every journey that includes billing needs to be reviewed. Connected maps make this traceable. Disconnected maps make it invisible until a customer reports the inconsistency.
When to split, merge, or retire a journey map
A growing portfolio needs active curation. Not every map should live forever, and not every map has the right boundaries.
Split when a single map tries to cover too much. If the map has more than 30 to 40 steps, represents fundamentally different experiences for different personas, or is so complex that nobody actually uses it, break it apart. An onboarding journey that covers both self-serve and enterprise implementation is really two journeys. Splitting them makes each one usable.
Merge when multiple maps cover overlapping territory with minor variations. If two maps share 80% of their steps and differ only in a few persona-specific moments, consolidate them into one map with persona annotations rather than maintaining parallel versions. Two maps that drift apart over time cost more than one well-maintained map with clear variation points.
Retire when a map represents a journey that no longer exists, like a deprecated product or discontinued service. Also retire maps that haven't been reviewed in over a year and that nobody references. Archive them rather than deleting, in case the historical context proves useful, but remove them from the active portfolio so they don't clutter the system or confuse stakeholders.
A simple annual portfolio audit catches these situations. Review each active map: is it current? Is it being used? Does it duplicate another map? Does the journey it represents still exist? This takes a few hours once a year and prevents map sprawl.
Governance across multiple journeys
Managing one journey requires one owner and one review cadence. Managing multiple journeys requires a system. Journey map governance at portfolio scale has four elements.
Ownership per journey. Every active map has a named owner accountable for its accuracy and relevance. No orphan maps. When someone leaves the organization or changes roles, ownership transfers explicitly.
Tiered review cadence. Not every journey needs the same attention. High-impact journeys, like core onboarding or the primary purchase flow, get quarterly reviews. Stable, well-understood journeys get biannual or annual reviews. Exploratory or early-stage journeys get reviewed as needed. Tiering prevents governance from becoming a full-time job.
Standards across maps. Consistent formatting, terminology, and data requirements across all maps. Without standardization, you can't compare journeys, identify cross-journey patterns, or make portfolio-level decisions. This doesn't mean every map looks identical, but the structure should be consistent enough that someone familiar with one map can read any other.
Portfolio review. A biannual or annual review of the entire portfolio. Not a review of each map's content, but a portfolio-level assessment. Which maps are current? Which are orphaned? Where are the gaps? Which journeys should be added, merged, or retired? This is where you step back from individual journeys and ask whether the portfolio as a whole gives you the view you need.
Governance is what turns a collection of maps into a managed portfolio. Without it, more maps means more noise, not more insight.
Prioritizing across journeys
A structured portfolio enables strategic decisions about where to invest. Without prioritization, teams improve whatever journeys they happen to own rather than the journeys that matter most.
Four inputs drive journey prioritization:
- Business impact. Which journeys affect revenue, retention, or cost most directly? The primary purchase journey and the churn-risk journey likely outweigh an internal-only process
- Customer pain. Which journeys have the most pain points, the lowest satisfaction scores, or the highest complaint volume? Data from journey metrics makes this comparison possible
- Strategic alignment. Which journeys connect to current organizational priorities? If the company is focused on reducing churn, renewal and support journeys get attention
- Improvement feasibility. Which journeys have pain points that are actionable with available resources and authority?
A simple approach: plot your L2 journeys on a matrix with customer impact on one axis and business impact on the other. Focus improvement efforts on the high-high quadrant. Deprioritize low-impact journeys regardless of how well-mapped they are.
Cross-journey analysis adds another layer. Look across the portfolio for systemic issues. If the same pain point, a confusing billing statement, a slow response time, or an unclear status update, appears in five different journeys, fixing it once creates leverage across all five. Portfolio-level thinking finds these patterns. Individual journey analysis misses them.
Getting started: organizing existing maps
Most teams aren't starting from scratch. They have a pile of maps created at different times, by different people, in different formats. Here's a practical process for bringing order to existing work.
- Audit. List every journey map in the organization. Who created it? When? Is it current? Is anyone using it? This alone often reveals duplicates and orphans nobody knew existed
- Assign hierarchy levels. Classify each map as L1 (lifecycle), L2 (journey), or L3 (micro-journey). If you don't have an L1 lifecycle map, create one. It becomes the organizing backbone
- Categorize. Map each journey to a lifecycle stage and tag it by persona, product, or business unit as appropriate
- Resolve duplicates. Where multiple maps cover the same territory, decide which to keep, merge, or retire. Involve the teams who created them
- Assign ownership. Every surviving map gets a named owner
- Connect. Link L2 journeys to their L1 stages. Identify handoffs and shared touchpoints between journeys
This process typically takes one or two focused working sessions with the CX team, not months of effort. The output is a structured portfolio where every map has a place, an owner, and a connection to the bigger picture.
Managing multiple customer journeys is a structure problem, not a mapping problem. More maps don't automatically mean better customer understanding. Organized, connected, governed maps do.
The framework is practical: build a three-level hierarchy, categorize and connect your maps, establish governance that scales, and prioritize based on impact. If you already have maps scattered across the organization, start with an audit. Build the hierarchy. Assign owners. Connect the dots.
The goal isn't a perfect portfolio. It's a portfolio of maps that work together to drive better decisions across the entire customer experience.
FAQ
How many journey maps should an organization have?
There's no universal number. Most organizations need one to three L1 lifecycle maps and 10 to 30 L2 journeys covering their core customer experiences. L3 micro-journeys are created as needed for deep analysis. The right number is whatever gives you coverage without duplication.
What's the difference between a journey hierarchy and a journey atlas?
A hierarchy defines the zoom levels (L1, L2, L3) and how maps relate vertically. An atlas or repository is the central location where all maps are stored and organized. You need both: the hierarchy provides structure, and the atlas provides access.
How do you manage journey maps across different teams or business units?
Establish a shared L1 lifecycle map as the common reference. Each team owns their L2 and L3 journeys within that structure. Consistent standards (format, terminology, data requirements) make maps comparable. A portfolio review brings teams together periodically to identify overlaps and gaps.
What tools do you need to manage multiple customer journeys?
For a handful of journeys, shared documents and a spreadsheet inventory can work. Beyond ten active maps, you need a platform that supports hierarchy, linking, collaboration, and portfolio views. The key requirements are connecting maps across levels, tracking ownership and review dates, and enabling cross-journey analysis.
How do you prevent journey map duplication across teams?
Start with a visible, searchable repository. If teams can easily find existing maps, they're less likely to create duplicates. Pair this with an L1 lifecycle map that shows which areas are already covered. Regular portfolio reviews catch duplication early.
