There is one tool I use for everything. It’s called a Customer Journey.

It’s name implies that it’s just for customer experiences, but that isn’t true. I use it to walk through the before, during, and after…of any problem.

Working on your hiring process? What happens before, during, and after someone is hired?

Acquiring customers? What happens before, during, and after closing a customer?

Reviewing a campaign? What happens before, during, and after the campaign?

Working on a marketplace? What happens before, during, and after a customer buys OR a vendor starts selling?

This tool takes practice. Most people give up on it too early because on the surface it looks like a waste of time. But over the years you find that a customer journey enables you to break down problems faster, while enabling groups of people to deliver work that contributes to the same overall problem.

What makes this easy to learn is that everyone goes through this process in their head. People mentally build their own map and work through how they are going to solve it. All a customer journey does is take everything out of your head and map it into a structure that everyone can use.

How To Make A Journey

You start by taking a problem you’re working on and then go through the before, during, and after for that problem. Lets use a generic problem…completing the morning with my three little kids. Ultimately we need three kids who are fed, dressed, happy, and mentally ready to start their day.

I would start a journey by listing…what happens before they wake up, during wakeup, and after they wakeup?

Before

• i wake up (without waking up my wife).
• do my stuff (breakfast, coffee, work, etc.)
• grab the kids (hearing, picking up, and taking to our room).

During

• kids wake up (cuddle, make a plan, etc)
• do their morning list (teeth, bathroom, clothes, etc)

After

• eat breakfast (make, serve, and sit with them)
• clean breakfast (clear table, clean, etc)
• first play (suggest, decide, and play)

Once you have everything down you can start grouping steps.

Continuing the example above, I started by listing each morning thing I did…bathroom, drink water, make coffee, eat breakfast, etc. After seeing all the steps on paper I then realized that really this was all one step for "do my stuff." Everything I listed was all the same effort with the same goal of completion without making up my kids. So I grouped it as one step.

My morning journey would look something like this.

Once I have a customer journey I can then look at each step and come up with solutions to better solve it. Continuing with "do my stuff," I would generate ideas that improved the process.

• closing their bedroom doors first to cut down noise and light
• pre-make my bowl of cereal the night before.
• plastic bowl and spoon so it makes less noise when eating.
• cold coffee in the am instead of hot coffee.
• laptop pre-charged so don’t have to make noise with cables, plugging in, etc. …etc.

Once I had potential solutions I would refine my customer journey. I might even add a new column, such as "the night before." Here I could list out steps I could take the previous day to make my morning better.

Why It Matters

A customer journey helps you scale.

Lets say I added my wife to this problem and together we were working to improve our mornings. If she had her own mental map and I had mine then we won’t get very far. Secondarily if she didn’t have a mental map and just jumped into "make breakfast" the solutions could be in conflict to the broader problem we’re trying to solve over the long term.

Scale this out and say you had a team of five people working to make our family mornings better. Without the entire problem mapped out you get into solution mode without context to how the solutions impact the overall objective. Therefore when each person finishes their work you then have to make changes if the solutions don’t fit together. If everyone first started by looking at the same customer journey you’d get 5x the amount of mental horsepower on how to reduce steps and build solutions that scale across the steps.

Now substitute my family morning problem for any problem in your company.

How To Start

If you have time, I’d recommend learning customer journeys on your own before bringing them to your team. Start with a piece of paper and learn how to map out steps, edit them, and brainstorm ideas.

Your structure is…

• Before, During, and After stages placed left to right on top of the page.
• Start listing out all the steps that coincide with each stage.
• Group similar steps until you have a handful per stage.
• Refine the detailed steps within each vertical grouping.
• Brainstorm how you’d start solving problems to reduce / simplify steps.

A template for this could look something like this.

Then practice this for any problem your company is facing. It will help you think about the whole problem and point out holes in the team’s work. It will also help you look at how to group the work while ensuring their solutions aren’t in conflict to the larger problem they are solving.

Once ready I’d start creating digital versions of the customer journey you then use with the team. Trello or Google Spreadsheets works well for this. Their first step is to learn how to read them and yours is to learn how to explain them.

This will go on for a few projects until the team is ready to start writing their own. Keep in mind they will need to go through your same learning curve so don’t get frustrated when their initial customer journeys are terrible.

A secondary caution is that customer journeys are best if created by one and edited by many. Multiple authors is hard as you need one person who ultimately refines this to one experience.

If you don’t have time to develop this skillset on your own before teaching it, then you’ll have to accelerate it with just your leadership team. You’d ask to see a customer journey for major projects they are working on which will force them to learn the skill faster. You won’t care how they do it other than you can follow their logic while showing you how big the problem is.

When To Use It

Personally I use them all the time. Even if just on a scratch piece of paper, it helps me understand the whole problem and how the team is solving it. I can edit work better if I have a clear journey.

Within a team environment we only create them for major projects or brand new experiences. They are included in our Creative Briefs, but not used for every project. Coincidentally, the project leads who use customer journeys often deliver tighter projects. Their teams appreciate that the details were thought through and people are scrambling to patch holes that were missed.

Please keep in mind any changes to team process can take time so if you implement a Customer Journey be patient as your culture learns to use them.

Conclusion

This is the tool I use more than anything else in creating and running a company. I use it in a variety of ways and whenever I help a new startup the discussion always ends up in a customer journey discussion.

To help, I created a basic template in google docs. You are welcome to copy it and improve it for your own needs. You are welcome to email or DM if you need help with your own customer journeys.

Customer Journey Template

(below are a few examples i outlined.)

Example – Product Roadmap

This is an example for how you’d build a product roadmap.

For this example I’ll assume I’m a startup who is looking to make tools to improve the manufacturing of products. These would be software based tools to make it easier for smaller companies to manufacture better products.

I would start with a single manufacturing type, lets say soft goods. Once I had a journey for this segment I’d repeat this exercise for each new market we’re entering…lets say consumer electronics was next.

To map out soft-goods I would interview potential customers to understand what they do today before, during, and after they manufacture a new product. Without coming up with solutions I would just start listing, interviewing, and looking at their existing tools. I’d do this with a handful of different companies with different types of soft goods. Ultimately I’m trying to create a mental map of me being on their team, manufacturing new products.

I would then group my steps such as…

• Research the market
• Concepts
• Prototypes
• Factory selection
• Manufacturing setup
• First samples
• Second samples
• Production
• Shipping

I would then flow steps within each grouped column to deeply understand how they solve these steps today. It would help me better understand all the problems from their POV.

Once I had this mapped out I would then look at which problem I can solve first with the resources I have. This would be product one, version one. Over time I would add new versions to my first product followed by new products that tackle different problems within the journey.

I could add new products within my first market (soft-goods) or take this same playbook to similar markets (consumer electronics).

If done right, this journey could take me 10 yeas to execute with products and services.

Example – A Marketplace

This is an example for how you’d build a marketplace journey.

In this example you have to map out two customer journeys. The first for the supply side of the marketplace. The second for the demand side.

To map out the supply side I’d work through before, during, and after the joining of the marketplace. I’d look at how people do this today with other marketplaces to get the core steps down of what people have to accomplish. I would then look at which of these problems we would have to solve first and in which order.

To map out the demand side I’d go through a similar process to look at before, during, and after making a first purchase. Assuming that after a first purchase I can start a relationship I’d be focused on what the major steps are, followed by how we’d solve those steps.

It’s important to note you can solve these customer journeys in a variety of ways. The solution isn’t always a new feature, product, or service. Sometimes you solve it with content or marketing or sales. You can also ignore whole problems until you have time to really solve them.

We created a similar journey for Moment Travel. It’s a marketplace for photography trips. We’re 18 months in and on version 3 of the journey as we learn what works to improve the Guide and Customer steps.

Example – Internal Process

This is an example if you are creating any internal team processes.

We recently improved the first two weeks at Moment. This work was part of a customer journey I had built and refined a few years ago…working at moment.

To start I built a journey for before, during, and after joining the company. I looked at how other companies do this and interviewed people on the team who recently joined.

I started with lots of lists for steps people go through. I then grouped those steps…

• Discover the job.
• Apply
• Filter and interview
• Project to hire
• Close
• Day 0
• Week 1
• Week 2

Ultimately this work has resulted in two separate journeys. The first is process within Moment before, during, and after hiring someone. The second is the new employee process before, during, and after they join. They are connected but separate journeys.

Over time we have picked off chunks of this journey work on.

1. Project to hire: We spent a few years improving our process between interviewing and selecting the potential employee.

2. Application: Later we went back and simplified our application process through one tool and one internal process.

3. First Two Weeks: Now five years in, we are shipping a 1.0 version that improves your firs two weeks at Moment.

By having a broader customer journey we were then able to decide what to work on and in what order.