One customer type through every stage: what they do, think and feel, and where you lose them.
A journey map is only as good as the research under it. Drawn from a workshop's guesses, it's a poster. This one cites 12 interviews, 286 support conversations and a year of account data, all invented for the sample, and shows how to lay evidence out so two teams can act on it.
Who it's for
A researcher, product marketer or founder who has talked to customers and needs product and marketing to see the same picture. Send it a few days before planning, so the meeting is about what to fix first.
It's the wrong tool before you've done the interviews. A map with no quotes and no numbers records what your team already believes. It also covers one kind of customer. If a school with twelve teachers buys differently from a teacher working alone, that's a second map.
What a good one contains
- One customer, described in a few lines. The sample's is a solo piano teacher with 31 students who does her admin on Sunday night. A map of "users" averages away everything you could act on.
- Stages named for what the customer is doing. "Moves her students over" and "First billing run" are hers. "Onboarding" and "activation" are your funnel's.
- Doing and thinking in separate rows. What she does comes from watching and from account data. What she thinks is a quote: "I've asked the Okafors twice. I'm not asking a third time."
- A feeling line with a scale. Each teacher scored each stage from −2 to +2, and the line plots the median. A curve drawn by eye is decoration.
- Pain points beside the stage that causes them. One or two per stage, in plain words.
- A fix with an owner. Every idea is tagged Product or Marketing, and three are ranked under the map as the ones to do first.
- A number for each stage. 84% ran billing in their first 30 days. The quote tells you what it felt like, and the number tells you how many it happened to.
Where these go wrong
The usual map tries to cover every customer and ends up twelve columns wide. Six stages fit a laptop screen.
Say how the feeling line was made and who you didn't hear from. The sample admits ten of its twelve teachers had renewed, so it knows less about the ones who left.
Six columns can't sit side by side on a phone, so the sample stacks the stages and keeps a small numbered copy of the line above them. Check yours at that width. Half the team will open it on the way to the meeting.
How to send it
To named people. It shows where customers give up, in their own words, and how many renew. Open it to your company's domain so the whole product and marketing team can read it.
Every page you publish gets one link that opens in any browser. You choose who can open it: anyone with the link, anyone with the password, or only the people and company domains you name, who sign in with Google or Microsoft. Change the page later and the link stays the same.
