Journey-Centric Design Lessons Learned: From Culture Change to Process Governance

Team members from several organizations partnered with NN/g to provide detailed information about their organizations’ journey-centric approach to customer experience. In this article, we share some of the lessons these teams have learned as they have established and matured their journey-management operations.

Journey-Centric Design and Journey Management

Journey-centric design is a philosophy and framework that focuses business and design operations around customer journeys.

Journey management employs journey-centric design operations to manage journey experiences through ongoing research, measurement, and optimization to improve customer experience and achieve business goals.

Establishing a journey-management practice within an organization is a slow evolution. It happens in stages that require process, focus, flexibility, and culture change.

Organizations Participating in Our Research

For our report Architecting a Journey Management Practice: How Leading Organizations Transformed Design Operations to Maximize Business Value, we conducted research with four organizations that practice journey management.

The teams from these organizations successfully advocated for organizational change and learned from the nuances of navigating that change.

Organizational Change Requires Mindset Change

Most organizations approach experience design with a product-centric mindset. In contrast, journey-centric design requires teams to think and work with a crossfunctional viewpoint that is centered on the customer journey. That means that organizations must be open to changing how they approach customer problem solving. This mindset shift both requires and facilitates attitudinal change.

A Top-Down Mandate Isn’t Enough

Even if the mandate for change comes from senior leadership or the C-suite, the change can’t be accomplished without buy-in from across the organization, up and down the org chart. No matter how strong a CEO’s vision is, there can still be some angst during the transition.

One challenge that results from transformational change is the need for deliberate change management to promote the necessary cultural change and support the adoption of new ways of working. Successful organizations make change management as much of a priority as the work itself.

Change Mindset Before You Change Operations

Operationalizing journey-centric design requires organizations to create a culture around customer experience, which can only happen one step at a time.

It is critical to create a shared understanding across the business, design disciplines, and product teams about the benefits of journey-centric design and the costs of not adopting it.

Be proactive about change-management efforts to support the staff whose day-to-day work will be most affected. Provide education and mentoring so that there is buy-in before there are deliverables. Achieving this shared understanding might require time, training, and socialization.

Training

Ease the transition to the new process by helping those involved understand the mindset it requires and their role in achieving the goal. Efforts we’ve seen work include:

• Informational road shows
• Guest speakers
• Formal training
• Resource libraries

Resource libraries were useful for supporting employees through the transition so they could learn on their own time. Such libraries included internally created strategy and vision materials, operational playbooks, and external resources such as educational articles, reports, and case studies.

One organization created a working group to teach designers to connect design efforts to business outcomes. The training this team provided followed the organization’s established operational process, from the project-scoping phase to the delivery phase.

Time

Change doesn’t happen overnight. There are often misconceptions about how long the process will take and what is required to make it happen.

Recognize that people sometimes need to hear about journey-centric design from several sources and acclimate at their own pace before being ready to adopt it as part of their day-to-day work.

Don’t rush. Start small with an initial pilot effort and expand after a few cycles that include process improvements. The organizations we interviewed gave their teams time to process the new model and adapt their mindset. This time buffer allowed employees to educate themselves using established resource libraries, discuss the changes with colleagues, get used to the idea of change, and build a sense of individual ownership over the strategy. Sometimes, a transition of several months was allocated before teams were asked to participate in a journey-centric effort.

Socialization

Showcase successful journey-design efforts and explain how a journey-centric mindset and supporting operations helped achieve these successes.

To drive culture change, one team we spoke to launched various initiatives to empower designers and researchers to share their successes with the experience-design department and crossfunctional partners. These initiatives included:

• Easy-to-use case-study templates. Templates were developed and made available to employees, who could browse existing case studies and create their own.
• Forums for showcasing work and expanding the dialogue. A “Design Month” event included activities, speakers, and case-study presentations to celebrate successes and share best practices.
• Emerging-leaders program: The organization created a training program for emerging experience-design leaders that included a module on how to write case studies and evangelize the journey-centric experience-design strategy.

Effective case studies for education and culture change should illustrate how the new strategy and collaborative process contributed to the results.

A good case-study template should include:

1. An overview of the original journey experience and the insights that informed design
2. The strategy for the journey, including the problem statement
3. How the crossfunctional journey team worked together to design a better experience, including: how each role was involved in the process, milestones, cadences, and ceremonies
4. The outcomes of the effort, including improved performance metrics and themes from qualitative feedback

Strike a Balance Between Autonomy and Control

Establish Governance

It’s critical to codify process methodology. A journey-management playbook is a crucial resource that saves journey teams time and can serve to establish governance.

All four organizations we researched created such a playbook. These playbooks are useful for communicating the general approach to journey management.

Assign a team member to be the dedicated methodology/playbook owner and tend to its maintenance and improvement. Part of this role is to ensure that the organization considers best practices and incorporates improvements made by teams actively working to improve journeys.

Support Trial and Error

Achieving journey-centric maturity requires some trial and error to find the work practices that suit the organization. Initial operational processes will likely need adjustment as the program grows and changes.

That means the process in place should support change as it happens. Nobody gets it “right” on the first try. The theory has to meet reality, and when it does, there has to be institutional tolerance for change.

For example, one organization created a playbook to document the processes that worked during its initial pilot efforts. When it began onboarding more journey teams, it became clear that a highly logistical journey could not be supported with the journey-team structure and processes in the playbook. Work on the logistical journey required that the journey team include contributors from the logistics function and that the design process be adjusted to make room for logistics assessments, testing, and validation.

For this reason, the person or team overseeing the journey-management practice should also oversee the onboarding of journey teams, consult with them about their unique needs, and allow for situational adjustments.

Two of the organizations we spoke with created a separate journey-operations team, whose work was focused on onboarding new journey teams, documenting their needs, and adjusting the existing processes. The idea of a journey-operations team is to remove any obstacles from the journey managers' day-to-day work and to pave the way for the journey-management team, whose responsibility is to deliver a better experience.

The responsibilities of journey-operations teams included:

• Provide governance over the process
• Manage the journey library, the catalogs of journey maps and blueprints.
• Maintain the consistency of outputs
• Select and maintain tools and resources
• Create efficiencies
• Establish criteria for journey selection
• Establish the metrics and measures for journey success
• Conduct measurement and reporting

Cooperate; Don’t Compete

If journey management had a mantra, it would be: “Cooperate, don’t compete.”

Avoid Working in Isolation

Working with crossfunctional journey teams means borrowing resources from other business areas. This is an advantage but also a challenge because teams might end up competing for resources.

Because customer journeys transcend organizational silos and digital products, stakeholders from these areas must be actively involved in planning for and supporting a journey-centric design effort.

Proactive and consistent communication between these stakeholders helps diffuse competition over resources.

Relate Efforts to Business Goals

Journey-centric design brings together user-centered design workers and business stakeholders who own the business operations behind the delivery of customer journeys.

Effective communication is paramount in bridging the gap between design and business leaders. Identifying opportunities based on business outcomes and articulating design decisions in business language fosters alignment and support, enabling organizations to leverage journey-centric design as a strategic tool for innovation and growth. Below, we outline a case study in which one journey team did just that.

Case Study: Investment-Journey Redesign Doubled Tool Adoption and Reduced Dropoff

The financial institution that was part of our research set up a journey team to improve the experience of working with an investment advisor. Investment advisors who worked for third-party firms utilized tools provided by the financial institution to identify investment products, provide product recommendations, and help customers invest in these products.

Tool adoption by advisors was dismal, and the dropoff rate for product applications started by advisors was high.

The journey team’s research found that investors often felt confused and struggled to find important information relevant to them. Additionally, the digital solutions and process for advisors were inadequate, which impacted tool adoption, task completion, and, ultimately, sales.

The journey team created journey maps to document these findings. Team members related recommended design improvements to business goals by quantifying the unrealized gains from incomplete applications and highlighting these elements in the journey map. They also projected the sales and revenue gains that could be achieved by improving the advisor journey and the tools used to serve customers.

As a result of this effort, the application dropoff was reduced by 12%, and tool adoption doubled.

Create Business-Driven Priorities and Reduce Competition

Most organizations practice product-centric design in silos and the prioritization process often creates competition between departments and product teams, as they each have their own priorities and budgets.

Organizations must develop a prioritization method based on business objectives, defining shared priorities for journey teams and product teams. This means that work done by product teams will include both product-centric and journey-centric efforts that are prioritized based on the overarching strategy and business priorities. This approach will help create alignment and foster cooperation around shared goals.

Balance Present Needs with Future Aspirations

Dream Big, then Build What Makes Sense Now

The journey-management process must optimize the current state of the journey while keeping a close eye on what it may look like in the future. Maintaining focus on both current efforts and long-term goals requires a delicate balance between dreaming big and operating within existing constraints.

Improvements to even small parts of the journey can be critical milestones to achieve, but the push-and-pull of determining how big or small to go at any given time requires a constant reevaluation of where things stand in relation to the future.

One way to achieve that balance is to design an ideal-state journey map and keep it as a reference point. As journey teams work toward the ideal state, they should continually consider new insights and reevaluate their long-term strategy.

Make Clear Short-Term Plans, Be Flexible About Long-Term Roadmaps

The teams we interviewed reported that their journey-design roadmaps are quite dynamic. They aren’t “locked in” for each quarter.

The goal of these plans is to give stakeholders and team members a clear, firm picture of the work coming up in the next quarter, about a month before it needs to begin. Plans also facilitate communication between journey and product teams, enabling them to examine their priorities and roadmaps to ensure they are building cohesive solutions across products without introducing inconsistencies or dependencies.

The plans also attempt to project work for subsequent quarters, but with a declining level of certainty, as the work focus could shift. So, roadmaps for subsequent quarters should provide a medium level of certainty. Then, beyond six months, the plan may contain only loose, highly malleable placeholders for potential work.

Leaders may uncover other priorities over the coming months and defer loosely planned work for a later date. The critical part of this flexible planning flow is that it is managed through effective communication between design leaders working toward a unified design strategy.

There’s No Such Thing as "Done”

The work required to be a best-in-class, customer-centric organization is never over. Technology evolves, and customer expectations continue to rise. That means organizations must iterate on their CX operations, overcome challenges, and replicate best practices in areas still newly established or maturing. This evolution requires attention to three pillars: experimentation and iteration, consistency, and patience.

There is no definitive path from inception to journey-management maturity. Establishing journey-centric operations is just one piece of the puzzle. It takes more to scale and achieve this mandate across entire organizations, particularly if they are large and complex.

Transformation doesn’t happen uniformly across an entire organization, even with broad leadership support. Most organizations experience pockets of success. A specific business sector or a regional sector may lead the charge, while some business units may lag. That means that, no matter the size of the organization, it must be committed to fostering experimentation and growing its expertise in service of the customer experience.

Lessons learned are opportunities for improvement, not failures. The most successful teams look back at their work with the same scrutiny they apply to planning future efforts.

Learn More

Our report, Architecting a Journey Management Practice, is a prescriptive guide to developing a journey-centric design practice. It includes operational models, strategic frameworks, and two in-depth case studies illustrating how real organizations retooled their design operations to achieve it.