True customer-centricity requires a fundamental shift in how organizations operate — from a product-focused mindset to a journey-centric one. This is not just a change in process, but a change in culture.
Most organizations approach customer experience with a product-centric mindset. Teams are organized around products or channels, and success is measured by product-level metrics. This approach, however, often leads to fragmented and inconsistent customer experiences. Customers don't experience products in isolation; they experience them as part of a larger journey to achieve a goal.
A journey-centric approach, on the other hand, focuses business and design operations around these customer journeys. It requires teams to think and work with a cross-functional viewpoint that is centered on the customer. This mindset shift both requires and facilitates a deep-seated cultural change.
It is critical to codify your 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 for this article created such a playbook. These playbooks are useful for communicating the general approach to journey management.
However, 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. 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.
If journey management had a mantra, it would be: “Cooperate, don’t compete.”
Working with cross-functional 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. This is where the bridge between design and business leaders becomes paramount. 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.
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.
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. 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.
