Run a Journey Mapping Workshop

Learning Objectives

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

Run a journey mapping workshop.
Synthesize insights and ideas.
Identify opportunities to deliver a better experience.

Welcome Your Cocreators and Get Down to Business

At the beginning of the workshop, it’s critical you set an inviting and collaborative tone. Reserve the first portion of the workshop to do the following.

Extend a warm welcome and start group introductions
Go over the agenda and set expectations for the day
Distribute and review materials

As a first activity, have your participants review your work thus far, and confirm that you've gotten each of the phases and actions right.

Do the phases and actions in the journey resonate as true to life?
Did we miss anything?
Did we include anything unnecessary?

It’s key to get these elements right before you move on. Once you’ve confirmed that they're the right ones, move on to the next stage.

Think About Your Customers Together

Have participants review the research materials for relevant customer quotes, feedback, and other insights. Make sure to prompt them to look beyond a business or product.

Customers are driven by relationship-based factors, like social dynamics, their values, their level of trust, emotional readiness to deepen engagement or move to the next phase, and potential community impact. Make these factors an intentional part of your insight collection process. Write each insight or quote on a single sticky note.

What happens when you don’t know what’s going on with your customer or user at a specific phase or activity? When you’re not sure, it’s okay to form a hypothesis and make a note to do some follow-up research. Another option is to restructure the phases and activities if they start to feel out of proportion with the rest.

Synthesize Your Research and Insights

Once participants go through the research materials for important insights, begin to synthesize. Synthesis is how we arrive at the key insights that form our customer journey. It’s our process for making sense, and it’s more of an art than science. Depending on the size of your workshop, you may want to break out into smaller groups to focus on each phase.

Sticky notes grouped together

Step 1: Cluster

Begin by clustering insights based on similar or related themes and ideas. Empathy is particularly important during this step, as you have to determine what's most important to your customers at each phase of their journey.

This is where sticky notes, or their virtual counterpart, are useful, because you can easily cluster and recluster ideas until the themes feel clear and resolved.

Step 2: Express

Craft phrases to express each important cluster around thoughts and feelings, touchpoints, and contexts. Aim to come up with the top three to four points for each square of your journey map grid, and add them to the grid when you feel they are complete.

As you move through this process, participants will undoubtedly come up with ideas and solutions for the opportunities section. When those ideas pop up, ask participants to note them in a “parking lot” (typically a blank board or a wall in the corner of the room) to go back to later, and resume your task.

Take a Step Back

Once you’ve synthesized the emotions, touchpoints, and contexts for each phase, come together to review the complete story your insights are revealing.

Ask yourselves a few questions.

Does it read as a coherent story?
Can you picture a real person having this experience? Or does it combine several different people’s journeys?
Which parts are most important to the customer?
Do any feel extraneous or misplaced?
Can you try reading it through with emphasis on emotions? How about social dynamics or values?

Edit the details after the workshop, but while you have everyone together you want to make sure there’s consensus on the big picture story you’re telling, and the key points around what’s working and what’s not.

This is a great time to think about whether the traditional timeline format is best for your journey map. Sometimes you’re describing an iterative process (like a tool to help customers pick paint colors) or a repeated behavioral loop (like for a digital grocery shopping experience).

You may want to reformat your map to reflect this, and in doing so, you may discover that the shape changes the way you look at the whole experience.

Find the Opportunities

Once you’ve got your coherent story, walk through it again, asking participants to extract opportunities based on whatever they’ve noticed is lacking, inefficient, or could be improved. These opportunities serve as recommendations for the organization.

Opportunities can be vastly different. For example: “Engage in social media with strategic purpose” (a somewhat vague goal) can exist on the same journey map as “Visualize the shipping route and package tracking” (a clear and specific idea). The point is to have the group call out ways the experience can improve. You’ll go from phase to phase, collecting your participants’ input.

End your workshop by asking people to vote for their favorite opportunities in each phase. Ask participants to consider:

Moments that matter most to the customer.
Metrics you might improve.
Places where your organization can contribute to the community or the world in some way.
How well they satisfy business objectives using current capabilities.

Each participant can use sticky dots to vote on their top two ideas in each phase, and discuss why people voted for the most popular ideas, if time allows. Eliminate opportunities that represent short-term gains at the expense of longer-term relationships; they’re ultimately bad for your business.

Now that the workshop is over, it’s time to craft the final artifact, your journey map.