Journey Management as the New Design System

Similar to how Design Systems changed the game, Journey Management is poised to revolutionize how modern companies operate.

Think of your favorite smartphone app. Does the experience feel smooth? Does the entire user interface look nice and cohesive? It may come as little surprise, but this is no accident: there are entire teams of digital designers at tech companies large and small whose sole purpose is to ensure that their product offers you a wonderful, cohesive experience. While there are many factors that influence the user experience (more on this later), one of the key components of all modern digital design teams is their Design System. Design Systems have completely revolutionized software design, growing rapidly in popularity in recent years. While you may be familiar with the concept of Design Systems, there is another strategic approach that I see as the ‘next big thing’ for modern design teams: Journey Management.

I’ll define it more deeply below, but in a nutshell, Journey Management makes it easier for leaders across business units to effectively manage their user journeys at a holistic level, ultimately aiding in better decision-making and an improved customer experience. Unlike Design Systems, which are more tailored for digital design/product teams, Journey Management is a practice that is focused on experience design more broadly, meaning it can be applied to the entire end-user journey as opposed to just what happens on the screen of your smartphone.

While Journey Management is the relatively new kid on the block, it has the potential to revolutionize experience design (and how we think of user journeys in general) in the same way Design Systems have forever changed how we think of product design. It can be the Design System for service designers, experience designers, and really anyone who is seeking to improve their end-user journeys.

An Overview of Design Systems

Before I start geeking out on Journey Management (which I will), I want to first give a bit of context. If you’re unfamiliar with Design Systems, the Nielsen Norman Group offers this wonderful summary on the topic in their “Design Systems 101” overview:

Essentially, Design Systems help design teams to focus on their entire product ecosystem at a strategic level, with a particular focus on adhering to the product vision. In addition, Design Systems make it easier for design teams to maintain order and consistency across their entire product, as they stop designers from creating individual components in silos, which can lead to a disjointed customer experience. I like the below graphic to highlight how Design Systems pull together all of the different components needed for digital design.

A Bit of (Personal) History

While Design Systems have been around for some time, their impact and general pervasiveness has exploded in recent years, aided in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic. As more design teams moved to a remote environment in 2020, leaders found that the need for consistency and clarity of vision was paramount to the success of their product(s), and thus many turned to Design Systems as a major part of their solution. I witnessed this change firsthand and it was impressive in both its scope and speed.

Prior to joining TheyDo, I led the Customer Success team at Sketch, where I worked closely with design leads at some of the largest brands in the world. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, customers (mainly larger, Enterprise organizations) would occasionally mention their Design System in passing or might tentatively ask about any product updates related to Design Systems. Often, these questions felt exploratory and customers gave off the vibe that they had heard the term ‘Design System’ but didn’t really know what it meant for themselves or their organization. A lot of these teams had groups of designers working in silos, but didn’t quite have a way to get everyone on the same page.

Fast forward two years and ‘Design Systems’ came up on just about every customer call, with the questions and feedback becoming increasingly more mature and pointed. Design Systems went from a heady, theoretical concept to a core part of daily life for our customers in what felt like the blink of an eye. The reason for this is that Design Systems, when properly constructed and maintained, truly work. They help add governance, efficiency and clarity to the design process, and ultimately lead to a better experience for everyone involved (from the UI designer to the end customer). This rapid shift was truly exciting to witness, and I can’t help but notice similarities between Design Systems and Journey Management.

An Overview of Journey Management

As with Design Systems, the theory of Journey Management is about moving away from siloed thinking toward a focus on user journey(s) at a holistic and strategic level. Our friends at the Nielsen Norman Group offer this summary of the topic in their article “The Practice of Customer-Journey Management”:

While the concept of Journey Mapping may be commonplace across organizations of all sizes, these journey maps often don’t go far enough on their own to have a lasting impact on an organization. These journey maps are built with the best possible intentions, but they are often static and built by siloed teams within different business units. These journeys are not connected, and thus offer a limited view of the end user’s ultimate experience. These journeys are also not directly tied with results, so their impact is difficult to measure. In just about all cases, these journey maps become outdated the minute they are completed and are left to waste away on a forgotten Miro board .

Ok, that may be a bit dramatic, but the truth is that building journeys in siloes is inefficient and borderline irresponsible. It’s 2023. I can use software to have a crystal-clear video chat with anyone in the world. I can use AI to generate amazing designs and even write a hit song. When it comes to understanding an end-user’s journey (or more often, set of journeys), we can do better. This is where Journey Management comes into play.

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In essence, Journey Management is about making smarter decisions as a business.

Dan Sullivan

Principal Customer Success Manager, TheyDo

Journey Management is not just about thinking of a singular journey map, but is rather about considering the entire end-user experience across touch points (and internal teams). It is about tying the overall experience to concrete business goals and tracking the results. It is about true oversight and governance to help reduce duplicate work and build reusable components that can scale across journeys and produce real, tangible results. In essence, Journey Management is about making smarter decisions as a business.

Enter the Triple Diamond

To help visualize this idea of working in a journey-centric way across business units, the team at TheyDo has adopted the Triple Diamond workflow. You may be familiar with the service design concept of the Double Diamond, where Problems and Solutions are defined and placed in two distinct buckets. What we have found in practice is that the actual flow for solving an end-user’s needs is more complex. Solution discovery and delivery are actually two separate (though interconnected) concepts that impact different teams within an organization. As such, the concept of 'delivery' (and all that comes with it from design to development) should actually be its own unique diamond. Given this insight, we have embraced the concept of the Triple Diamond (just see our logo ), with the three Diamonds defined as:

1. Problem Discovery: Identifying the core problems to solve, by researching the current customer experience.

2. Solution Discovery: Defining how to address the core problems, by using idea generation and validation.

3. Solution Delivery: Implementing the prioritized Solutions and measuring their impact.

TheyDo’s Building Blocks

Based on the Triple Diamond workflow, our product team has broken out several key Building Blocks to help our customers structure their journeys in a way that more accurately reflects how companies are actually operating on a daily basis. In addition, all of these Building Blocks can be standardized across an organization, meaning an Insight uncovered by the product team can also be seen by the marketing team, and vice versa. Please see below for some brief definitions:

By thinking of journeys at not just at an individual team level (Service Design, Product team, etc.) but rather as an entire flow made up of problem discovery, solution discovery and delivery, and then tying said journeys back to real business goals, companies can gain insights and uncover efficiencies in ways that simply weren’t possible before.

Said another way, Journey Management allows companies to move from thinking about journeys from their own siloed perspective (from the inside-out) to thinking about journeys in a holistic, customer-centric way (from the outside-in):

Increasing Awareness and Adoption of Journey Management

While I am bullish about Journey Management (hence my decision to join TheyDo), I believe that we are still in the early days. I recently attended the Forrester CX North America Conference in Nashville and witnessed a palpable need for Journey Management, though often people had difficulty articulating exactly what Journey Management meant. I spoke with one company who estimated that they are leaving BILLIONS of dollars on the table due to lack of clarity across their end-user journeys, but they weren’t quite sure what steps to take to solve this issue (don’t worry, we’re helping them ).

This concern among leaders that siloed thinking is impacting their business is reminiscent of conversations I had with digital design teams prior to adopting a strong methodology for managing their Design System. Just as with digital design, business leaders can sense that there is a better way to manage their work, but adoption of best practices at these organizations is varied at best.

To help aid the adoption of Journey Management best practices, the team at TheyDo recently published a free Journey Management maturity scan. This scan allows companies to better assess their current Journey Management maturity level and to offer some suggestions on how they can improve their processes. While each organization is unique (and thus no two approaches to Journey Management will be exactly the same), this maturity scan is meant to help increase awareness of Journey Management as a practice, while also providing concrete trail markers along the path toward Journey Management excellence. Whether you are a TheyDo customer or not, I highly encourage everyone to take the scan. It’s free and only takes about 7 minutes to complete, and at minimum can offer food for thought on how you may be able to improve your overall end-user experience.

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Journey Management has the potential to alter how companies think about, measure and improve their end-user journeys.

Dan Sullivan

Principal Customer Success Manager, TheyDo

Viva La (Journey Management) Revolution

Journey Management is poised to revolutionize how modern companies operate. Similar to how Design Systems rapidly changed how digital products were designed and built, Journey Management has the potential to alter how companies think about, measure and improve their end-user journeys. Instead of working in silos, adherence to Journey Management best practices can bring disparate teams together across an organization to create wonderful experiences that allow customer and business needs to live together harmoniously. Journey Management truly has the potential to be the Design System for experience designers in a broader sense.

While this change won’t happen overnight, the revolution is underway. We are already seeing thought-leaders at some of the largest companies in the world adopt Journey Management best practices and I believe this is just the tip of the iceberg. As Journey Management becomes more widely adopted, the broader community needs to collaborate more freely. We need to share successes and best practices with our peers. We need to encourage each other and challenge ourselves to do better, both for the sake of our craft and for the customers whom we all serve. The revolution is underway, and I, for one, cannot wait to see what comes next. Won’t you join us?

Helpful Resources

If you’d like to learn more about Journey Management, below are some additional links to help aid your learning:

• An Introduction to the Journey Management Workflow

• Tips for Scaling Up Your Journey Management Process

• An Overview of Service Design Systems

If anyone would ever like to connect on this topic, I’d love to hear from you! Please reach out to me via email at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.