Using customer journey maps for gathering product requirements
We all know that customer journey maps are a rave in consumer companies (Airbnb uses it extensively by clubbing every feature they develop with a storyboard of its own). In all my years of designing products for enterprise applications, I have never seen B2B product designers making a full fledged chart of their’s customer journey. One reason is that designers in enterprise companies rarely have end to end visibility into sales and marketing of the products they are designing. Since our product (Qubole data platform) is extensive and different people interact with it differently, we wanted to map out their touch points.
So what is a customer journey map?
A complete map of your user’s interactions with product and its ecosystem helps in not just designing better, but also enables designers to generate insights into opportunities that they might not have discovered earlier.
And what did we do?
Based on our earlier research activities, we already had our personas defined, it was time to map the journey of each of the persona and leverage the potential of our design research initiative.
Knowing the vastness of Qubole’s platform, we knew such a map was going to be humungous and complex. Building this would involve brainstorming with people of different teams: sales, marketing, solutions, product and tech. Luckily, Qubole is a very flat organisation and the people are very approachable-When asked they were onboard to develop this graph that we envisioned.
We started with creating a framework that we used for cross team brainstorming.Then over a period of 4 weeks, we went around our persona verticals and mapped user’s journey stages with events. On top of this map, we incorporated the problems (in red) we were solving and opportunities (in orange) that we wanted to solve. For ex: In the awareness stage, one event occurred as “User gets to know about Qubole via our website and asks the Admin to enable it”. By laying it out in the journey map, we realised that a big opportunity to grow our user base will come by enabling analysts to register and start using Qubole without any admin help.
It was then time to show these maps (6 in total) to our users to validate our thinking and get their feedback on the problems that we are planning to solve. For this activity, we gathered our end users in a room with our customer journey maps printed and pasted all across the walls of the room. And like exploring artefacts in a museum, they were asked to roam around the room and tell us if the journey was similar to their digital journey with Qubole’s ecosystem. They could use post-its to add any stage/interaction they felt was missing.
Each customer was also given 5 star stickers which they had to stick to the problems they wanted us to solve. This restricted them to give importance to their recommendations and helped us in synthesising this data more quantitatively.
What did we do with this data?
These clusters created as a result of the activity were directly fed into our product requirement discussions. Firstly, this added as a prioritization framework in our roadmaps. Secondly, it opened up a lot of discussions around making these journeys/workflows seamless for our end users by linking them effectively.
The situation mentioned in the earlier example (user requiring admin help to get started) was simplified by merging two workflows. Now when a user becomes aware of Qubole, he can register and run his first command without admin support. Similarly, we are planning to merge interdependent workflows from different parts of our product to provide cohesive end to end experiences.
Have you ever tried to map out your customer’s journey? Do share in comments!
