Beyond frameworks: Rethinking journey structure in the age of AI

Tingting Lin · Principal Journey Management Coach
    coffee-chat-with-tingting-blog

    What happens when a Principal Journey Management Coach questions her methods in real time? That’s exactly what Tingting Lin did during one of the Coffee chats with TheyDo.

    Drawing on years of experience across industries — and a fresh experiment with Journey AI — Tingting invited the journey management community to rethink structure, strategy, and business impact in today’s data-driven, AI-powered world, where our current approach to journey structuring may no longer fit.

    Here’s what the chat percolated:

    From frameworks to flexibility

    In traditional journey management conversations, structure often takes center stage. Hierarchies, templates, taxonomies, Tingting has coached countless customers through the classic approach to journey structuring.

    But in this session, she set those frameworks aside to explore something deeper: How do we adapt our structures when AI changes the pace, context, and value of journey mapping itself?

    Rather than teaching a playbook, she opened the session with a challenge to the community: Let’s reflect together on what needs to change.

    Key takeaways

    1. AI accelerates the how, but also changes the why

    Mapping a journey used to take a week. With Journey AI, it now takes minutes. More than a productivity gain, it’s a mindset shift. AI allows teams to build journeys directly from qualitative data, uncovering insights faster—and often more organically—than with traditional, top-down frameworks. “This is the first time I’ve even shared this with customers,” Tingting said.

    With AI, the journey can emerge from the data itself. She demonstrated this with a telco example: uploading public Trustpilot reviews, she used Journey AI to generate phases, steps, and insights, then mapped those to an existing customer lifecycle, revealing both alignment and areas for improvement.

    Timestamp → 04:45

    2. Perfect structure does not equal progress

    Many CX teams get stuck trying to create the “perfect” structure. But as Tingting noted, that effort can come at a cost: Delayed business impact. "You can iterate it for months and years, and still it changes,” she said. "As you iterate with the theory and structure, you delay the business impact."

    Instead, she encouraged teams to move forward with a ‘good enough’ structure and refine it based on real needs, feedback, and outcomes.

    Timestamp → 07:15

    3. Use business challenges to focus your journey work

    Rather than starting with a journey and looking for insights, flip it. Start with a business challenge, and ask what journey or journeys relate to it. For example: Why are marketing costs up while transaction rates are down? “Everything becomes more meaningful when you connect it to a business challenge,” Tingting emphasized.

    This shift helps CX teams align their work with measurable value, reducing the risk of becoming siloed or perceived as non-strategic.

    Timestamp → 14:47

    4. Data can—and should—reshape your framework

    When she mapped insights back to a customer lifecycle, Tingting found areas where data simply didn’t show up—like “I receive my product.” That doesn’t always mean a broken process—it might mean a neutral customer moment, or a research gap. “Let the data inform your framework and let the framework guide your research,” she said.

    By highlighting where customer experience is strong—or absent—journey data becomes a tool for both strategic decision-making and stakeholder alignment.

    Timestamp → 28:41

    Let the journey emerge

    This coffee chat, part of our ongoing community series, wasn’t about discarding structure—it was about evolving it. With the rise of AI, Tingting reminded us that we now have the tools to move faster, focus sharper, and make journey management more responsive to reality.

    Whether you’re mapping a lifecycle or launching your first micro journey, one principle remains: structure is a means to an end. Let your journeys be guided by insight, aligned to business goals, and always grounded in impact. You don’t need a perfect journey atlas to make progress. Start small. Start where the data leads you.

    Coffee chat timestamps:  

    04:45 AI accelerates journey mapping and changes how we approach structure

    07:15 Why “perfect” frameworks can delay business value

    14:47 Linking journeys to business challenges

    28:41 How data (or its absence) should shape your framework

    40:45 Why starting with a micro journey often makes more sense