The Art of End-to-End Journey Mapping: A Comprehensive Guide
An in-depth tutorial on how to create effective end-to-end journey maps, including best practices and tools.
This is the second post in the my series on End to End Journey mapping. What end-to-end journey mapping is and why it matters has been covered in the first post.
Did you know that all major launches at Adobe go through multiple End to End Journey reviews? Here is how my team puts these reviews together. I hope this is the most comprehensive guide to journey mapping on the internet by daily practitioners.
End to End journey mapping and analysis is the ultimate customer centric practice. It puts the focus on understanding and improving the customer experience and breaks siloed thinking.
The business benefits in the following ways:
Aligns execs on how we are community value across channels and in-product
Reduced organizational churn on decisions as review document goals explicitly
Faster progress on customer experience issues due to aligned goals across teams
Increased customer satisfaction and value realization which leads to more throughput from the funnel
The Journey Mapping Process
Putting together E2E journeys takes a village. Here is an example of a relatively simple journey map that just focuses on Adobe’s paid creative cloud users and how they will experience our releases at MAX 2023.
Here are the 9 Steps to create an End to End Customer Journey review
E2E Kick off to document and align on goals and target user segments
Research and Data Collection with each stakeholder to prioritize important journeys to meet the goals.
Put together structural journeys to align on routing before bringing in high fidelity content into the journey map
Mapping user touchpoints by getting each team to contribute screens into a common presentation
Analyzing journeys mapped in #3 to identify pain points
Log bugs for issues that are deemed critical so that we can track them
Creating the Journey Map
Preflights to ensure alignment on issues
Implementation of Improvements and sharing E2E scorecards with execs
Here is an example journey scorecard for a recent release at Adobe. I’ve masked out some areas that are sensitive.
Tools and Resources for Journey Mapping
We use three tools for journey mapping but you can do all this work in Miro or in Figma alone.
Miro - we use Miro for the kick and off alignment meetings. It is very easy to bring people together in this tool because Adobe has an enterprise subscription to the product
Figma - Designers on various teams are using Figma for screen design. These designs are contributed into a Figma file that is then used to craft together a deck for execs
JIRA - filing bugs
Powerpoint / Keynote - sometimes we do our context setting slides in a standard presentation software since these slides do not require collaboration or contributions from various teams at the company.
We try to present the flows directly from Figma. Each journey is visually in its own row.
Where possible, we also show the actual landing pages on the stage environment. This is not common since a lot of what we are presenting is still a week or two from shipping. The creative is WIP and being iterated on.
Best Practices for Effective Journey Mapping
Customer Involvement: While each team does their own user testing, the E2E team also runs customer interviews just to get a feel for the users mental model as they engage with a journey.
Cross-Functional Teams need to work together with the E2E consultants to consolidate these flows. How to do this has been covered in this article.
Continuous Improvement: Highlight the iterative nature of journey mapping and the need for ongoing updates.
Conclusion
Is this post, I have shared an ultimate guide to E2E journey mapping at Adobe. I have shared tools and processes to build these journey reviews.
End to End journey mapping and analysis is key to delivering value to customers and ultimately to the business. I would love to learn about your challenges and successes as you try to implement these reviews at your company.
Additional Resources for E2E journey mapping
Regards
—Anubhav
Folks on the small and mighty E2E team at Adobe: