How Autodesk turned 130+ journeys into strategic intelligence

A product manager doesn't need a tour of your journey map. They need to know which customer problem to fix next and what fixing it could do for their metrics.

Khayyam Lasi, Program Lead, Journey Management at Autodesk, has built his work around that. "I'm done talking about journey management," he told the room at TheyDo's company retreat in September. "We are strategic intelligence for the organization."

Khayyam was Autodesk's first journey manager. Today his job is to make every other journey manager effective. He keeps asking, "How do I make sure they're able to sit in difficult rooms and tell the story of a journey nobody wants to read?"

His answer is TheyDo, plus a set of AI skills he built himself. Here's how he got there.

A team sport nobody wants to play

"Journey management is a team sport nobody wants to play," Khayyam says. He knows the hard version well. Before Autodesk, he spent a year on another tool, and his taxonomy lived in Excel sheets. At Autodesk, the team rallied around TheyDo for a simple reason: "It was very easy to use."

That choice gave Autodesk a shared foundation for its customer context. Khayyam's director, Florian Vollmer, explained why that foundation matters in How Autodesk built the context layer that makes its AI tell the truth. This story looks at what the journey managers building on it do every day.

And there is a lot to build on. Khayyam oversees a journey management program spanning more than 130 journeys across three to four levels, backed by thousands of insights, close to 2,000 opportunities, and 1,200 solutions. Those solutions range from early ideas to concepts in research and user testing.

Keeping that workspace clean and usable is part of his job. As more teams contribute, insights can overlap, duplicates creep in, and connections need attention. At this scale, checking everything by hand becomes a job in itself. Khayyam turned to AI to help.

Step 1. Use AI to clean up

When TheyDo released its AI features, most people jumped straight to asking questions about their data. Khayyam started somewhere else. "My first question was: Tell me how you can help me clean up."

He asked the TheyDo Agent to find insights that could be deleted or merged, with a score for each. It did that and told him how to stop the mess from coming back. So he turned that advice into a skill, a saved workflow that anyone in the workspace can run with a single command. Now, anyone about to add an insight runs the skill first. It tells them whether the insight already exists, should be merged, or is new.

Searching thousands of insights by hand was too much to ask of most people, Khayyam says. The skill keeps the shared context clean without turning everyone into a taxonomy expert.

Step 2. Give leaders a journey charter

Executives and product managers rarely have time for a full journey walkthrough. Khayyam's answer is the journey charter, which covers the who, what, how, and why of a journey on one page.

He asked the TheyDo Agent to draft a charter skill, drawing on its knowledge of journey management practice. Then he had Claude review and correct it. Khayyam's verdict: about 90% accurate, with only some visuals missing.

Each charter covers what a leader needs to know:

• The journey owner, metrics owner, and research lead

• The status of the journey and its key metrics

• Its purpose, scope, phases, and target audience

• The key takeaways

• A chart of insights, opportunities, and solutions across the journey's phases

Some fields are left empty on purpose. "Most service designers won't know to think about these questions," Khayyam says. The empty fields prompt them to.

Step 3. Show product managers what to fix first

Product managers need something closer to the decisions they make every day, so Khayyam built another skill he calls journey intelligence. Its job is to show them where to focus, backed by the context already in the workspace.

It gives any product manager the top three pain points on a journey in about five seconds. It ranks them by impact, using the journey’s metrics, its insights, and where those insights sit in the journey. Then it goes further. “I’m going to tell you not just the opportunity and pain points, but the impact to your metric,” Khayyam says. “And if you fix this, how the future metrics will move. This is gold.”

The skill does the work Khayyam once did by hand, so any product manager can get an answer the moment a question comes up.

One person pays the rent

Why is it so hard to get product teams to engage with journeys? Khayyam doesn't see it as a journey management problem. He thinks it's as old as service design itself.

A service designer, a UX designer, a product manager, and an engineer all work to improve the same experience. But if the metric doesn't move, it's the product manager and the engineer who answer for it. "We are in a relationship where one person pays the rent, and the other two are just like, take me seriously," he says. "Because the consequence is not shared."

That's why product teams take what they need from journey work and stay out of the rest. Khayyam thinks practitioners have to change that, and that journey management makes it possible. He calls himself a "journey shepherd" rather than a journey owner. He reports on the metrics, insights, and opportunities in his journeys and takes active responsibility for them. In his view, what needs to come next is for organizations to hold journey teams accountable for those metrics too.

Product managers rarely report back on what they shipped, so every quarter Khayyam asks, and offers to help: "You've done all this great work. I can help you tell your story, because I've been capturing it."

Same context, every altitude

At last year's Beyond the Map, someone shared a line with Khayyam that he now often repeats: "The rule of journey management is that you don't talk about journey management." What people want is answers to their own questions, not journey maps.

That's what the charter and journey intelligence skill give them. "The beauty of a journey map is that you can contextualize it at the altitude of your view," he says. "It's the same context, but broken down to your audience." Executives get the charter, product managers get ranked pain points with metric impact, and engineers get the detail of a level 3 journey. It all comes from one source.

For Khayyam, this is what journey management looks like when AI is part of the work. Journeys provide the context, and AI makes that context useful to the people who make the decisions.