Define Intention and Audience

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Define the business objectives for your solution.
Define the audience who will experience your solution.

Identify Your “Why” and “Who”

When you’re creating a journey map, you need to start with a set of assumptions.

Why you’re doing it, or the business objectives.
Who you’re focusing on, the audience that will be most impacted or best served by the experience you’re examining.

Knowing these helps you focus and ensures that your recommendations are relevant.

Dive into Business Objectives

Here are some common examples of business objectives that might lead a company to create a journey map. In each of these cases, you have an opportunity to look at the steps involved in engaging with your product or service, individually and as a whole.

Create a differentiated customer experience.
Acquire new customers.
Increase customers’ frequency of use of product or service.
Integrate a new feature or service into your existing experience.
Increase the efficiency or effectiveness of your product or service.
Improve the completion rate of a specific task or goal.
Improve service quality and reduce calls to support or service.

Find the Right Scope

Keep in mind that you want to build a journey map that’s the right size, or scope, which means it’s not too broad or too narrow. If you build a journey map that’s too broad, your insights will be too general and hard to apply, and you can struggle to get the right performance data to track your success. If you build a map that’s too narrow, you’ll end up focusing exclusively on one element of the experience and miss the broader context, not to mention spending too much of your team’s time on a small piece of the picture.

Let’s take a look at a few examples based on your customers’ needs. Note, writing the objective from the customer's point of view is a great way to practice empathy as discussed in the first unit.

Objective	Is this the right scope?
“I want to have all my needs met.”	This is too broad. Aim to gather more actionable, measurable insights.
“I want to view open cases.”	This is too narrow. Broaden your perspective to a bigger idea like, “I want to manage more customer requests.”
“I want to purchase a technology solution that helps us automate service processes.”	Yes! This is a tactical goal that will uncover insights about the whole journey. There’s a clear start and end point.

The right scope makes all the difference—defining it can take time, but it helps you set boundaries and deliver better results.

If your organization uses the Jobs To Be Done framework, you may create a journey map for satisfying a key job statement.

Define Your Audience

Your product or service most likely has a variety of users, and each of them may interact with your brand in a different way. This presents a challenge because each of these user groups has different needs and pain points. Identifying your users and their use cases in advance helps teams in your organization, like product and design, think more strategically about the holistic customer experience, and identify opportunities to improve customer engagement.

Here are examples of users to consider. Note, they need to be as specific as possible.

A segment of customers, like customers with field service fleets
Employees and partners, like job applicants or consultants supporting your new product line
Your customer’s customers, like retail customers ordering online and picking up curbside

Below are tips on how to start seeing the world through the eyes of different audiences.

Walk in Your Customer’s Shoes

When you create a journey map, you map the journey your customer follows when they purchase your solution or engage with your service. Some examples of the steps you take as you map your customer’s journey are:

Discover your customer’s business and goals.
Consider the solutions to help them achieve their goals.
Commit to a solution.

Walk in Your Employees’ and Partners’ Shoes

In this case, you use journey mapping to examine the experiences that you provide for employees and partners.

An example of this might be mapping the journey of a new hire and their onboarding experiences. In this case, you want to map the experiences at each step like:

Submit an application for a job opening.
Speak with a recruiter about the job.
Have interviews with the hiring manager and team.
Wait for the offer.
Receive the offer.
Negotiate the offer.
Accept the offer.
Attend first day orientation.
Onboard for the first 90 days.
Access new hire support for the first 180 days.

Walk in Your Customer’s Customer’s Shoes

If you’re a business-to-business (B2B) company, your customers have customers of their own. Your customer’s customers are the consumers, patients, constituents—all the people your customers serve. You can use journey mapping to help your customers understand how to better serve their customers.

This is more challenging because there are more kinds of them and their journeys are often more complex. Sometimes it’s better to choose a primary customer’s perspective first and then, if necessary, map secondary customer experiences.

Who Should You Focus On?

To figure out which customers to include in a journey map, ask yourself:

Who are the key customers involved in meeting the business objective?
Are there any additional people who influence their experience?
What other or new customers might become part of the journey as you solve for the business objectives?

In the end, only build a journey map if you have a clear understanding of the customer or user, built on research. Consider studying customer data or getting customer feedback through surveys, interviews, or group sessions. You can also learn more about customers by studying personas—models of key customer behaviors, attitudes, motivations, and goals. For more ways and tactics to get to know customers better, check out the Innovation Customer Discovery module.

In the next unit, you review the structure of a journey map and how to draft one.