Perspective: Marc Stickdorn
Learning from experience
Introduce yourself
I am the main author of This is Service Design Thinking and This is Service Design Doing, two influential books in service design. I hold a PhD in design science focused on CX research methods for customer journeys and lecture internationally on Service Design and Journey Management. As founder and CEO of Smaply, I launched the first dedicated journey mapping software in 2012. Based in Innsbruck, Austria, I balance work with mountains, good coffee, and family.
What is journey management to you?
For me, journey management is a human-centric information system for an organisation. It is not about creating a beautiful journey map once, putting it in a slide deck, and then moving on. It is about using journeys as a living structure for decision-making: a way to keep the focus on customers, users, citizens, patients, or employees in day-to-day work, especially in organisations that naturally drift back into silos. The journey map becomes the shared language where we can bring together pain points, unmet needs, live data, KPIs, ongoing projects, responsibilities, and opportunities, so people can see what is actually happening across the experience and decide what to improve next.
How do you think it is most effectively employed?
It works best when you start small, with what I like to call a “scruffy first draft,” and then learn, iterate, and scale from there. Don’t start with a big-bang approach and try to map the whole organisation at once; I’ve seen that fail over and over again. Start with one meaningful journey, maybe two sub-journeys, add real data where you can, connect it to the work already happening, and then create a rhythm around it: who owns or coordinates the journey, who brings in information, how often you review it, and how decisions are made. Over time, you build a hierarchy of maps, connect them horizontally and vertically, monitor KPIs, identify overlaps or contradictions between projects, and use tools such as opportunity portfolios to prioritise where you can have the biggest impact for customers and the organisation.
What is the biggest risk of failure?
The biggest risk is that journey management becomes another thing we document but do not act on. Teams get excited, fill maps with pain points, ideas, opportunities, projects, and research, but there is no governance, no decision rhythm, no funnel, and no real follow-up. By the funnel, I mean the agreed path that turns what appears on the journey map, think of pain points, unmet needs, ideas, opportunities, and the like, into smaller decisions: what we need to research first, what we should prioritize next, what goes into the research, design, or delivery backlog, who owns it, and how we later check whether it actually improved the experience.
Then people get frustrated because they keep adding things into the system but never see outcomes. Journey Management needs to grow in sync with the organisation’s capability and capacity to act on its decisions. So my advice is always: start small, start slow, build the funnel, and only scale when you can actually turn insights into decisions and decisions into improvements. Otherwise, journey management becomes a repository rather than an information system.
What is your most impactful journey management example?
One of my favourite examples is already almost 10 years old. A large company started rolling out Journey Management, or Journey Operations as we called it there, across three departments, adding projects from different departments onto the same journey map. After the very first meeting, they called us and said, “Is it normal that you feel down after your first meeting?” What happened was that, for the first time, they could see that two teams in two different departments had been running basically the same project for months. They had already wasted millions. But the important part is: from that moment on, they could stop wasting even more. This is the power of journey management for me. Not the map itself, but the new perspective it gives you on what the organisation is doing, where work overlaps, where projects contradict each other, and where money, time, and energy can be redirected toward a better experience.
Can you tell us a story that encapsulates journey management in real-life usage?
In my own company, we started using journey management for the sales and onboarding journey for enterprise customers around 2016. The high-level map covered the experience from research and pre-selection through evaluation, test phase, decision, onboarding, procurement, usage, and renewal. Procurement, by the way, can be a horrible experience for both sides. But the interesting part was not just the stages and steps of the journey. We added jobs-to-be-done, customer pain points, ideas, who is involved on our side, which channels and tools are used, which internal processes are triggered, KPIs, and even Jira connections so we could see our own projects, their status, their priority, and who was responsible. Suddenly, the journey was no longer a workshop output; it was a working system that helped the sales team, product team, and others see where the experience was healthy, where we needed to pay attention, and what work was actually happening.
That, for me, is journey management in a nutshell: a living map that helps people coordinate, prioritise, and improve the experience over time.
