Why you should build a customer journey map

As a Senior Product Designer at Segment, I recently workshopped with my teammates to build a customer journey map. I wanted to share my experience and the impact I saw it have on our team.

A customer journey map is a visualization of the process that a user goes through in order to accomplish a goal. In a team/ organization, the maps are typically used for —

1. Aligning on shared understanding of a user or service: While workshopping a journey map, individuals/teams can align on how the current experience is like from user’s standpoint, while pulling in all the (originally fragmented) knowledge and user data into consideration.
2. Aligning on shared vision: By building a journey map, individuals/teams can discuss and align on the critical information that will be displayed on the map, including the top unmet needs, user mindsets, user expectations, etc. It’s a great way to form shared vision for decision making as the team/organization moves forward.

Why did we decide to build one?

In order to gain value out of Segment products, our customers need to implement Segment data collection. One of our goals as a business is to improve that implementation process for our customers. To help drive this goal, we kicked off a user research plan with the intention…