Journey management has a scaling problem. This guy says he can fix it.

At the first Beyond the Map, Mark Smith got straight to the point. After 30 years in analytics, interaction management, and journeys, he has seen the same pattern play out again and again: organizations prove the value of journey management, then struggle to scale it. "Despite seeing lots of value being delivered," Smith told the Barcelona audience, "we don't see that many companies really taking it on and replicating it." The pattern, and the gap it revealed, frustrated him enough to co-found the Institute for Journey Management Institute (I4JM), a growing network of journey professionals, practitioners, and business leaders dedicated to cracking it.

The scaling paradox

The evidence for journey management's impact is substantial. Smith points to McKinsey research showing that companies focused on customer experience double their growth rate over five to ten years compared with those that don't.

Real-world examples back it up. Kroger, one of America's largest grocery chains, cut the volume of messages it sent customers by around 80%, prioritizing relevance over volume. The result? Engagement and sales went up at the same time costs fell — saving money and making money by doing less and listening more.

"This is journey management versus the kind of departmental journeys that often go on in organizations," Smith said. "It can have this vast multiplier on the returns you can get."

So why isn't everyone doing it?

What do you mean by “journey”?

Part of the problem, Smith argues, is definitional. "Journey" means entirely different things depending on who's saying it. In marketing, it typically refers to automated sequences designed to push customers toward conversion:  targeted messages, email nurture tracks, triggered responses. In service operations, it often means a workflow designed to reduce cost and handle volume efficiently.

Neither of these is what Smith means by journey management. Real journey management starts with listening to understand what customers are actually doing, what paths they take, where they drop off, what they need in that moment — and then responding accordingly. The difference in outcomes is significant. Smith estimates that properly executed journey management delivers around ten times the returns of marketing-led journey programs.

The confusion isn't just semantic. It shapes how executives perceive the work. When someone hears "journey project," they often hear "CX initiative," which, in many organizations, has been coded as a soft, peripheral concern rather than an operational priority. "Executives hear about this as an experience project," Smith said, "and they think that's a squishy thing."

That squishiness — the perception that experience work is hard to measure, hard to tie to business outcomes, too long in the making — is one of the biggest barriers to enterprise adoption.

The map is not the destination

For Smith, mapping is only the starting point. The next step is analytics, taking the designed experience and asking whether customers are actually moving through it the way you expected. Are they following the intended path? Where are they diverging? What does the data tell you about what's working and what isn't?

Step three is operations and orchestration, acting on what the analytics reveal. Intervening at the right moment, routing customers toward a better path, responding to what they've shown you they need. "That's journey management," Smith said. "It's those multiple steps that go beyond mapping. It goes well beyond marketing. It's a cross-departmental thing."

That cross-departmental reality is also part of what makes it hard. Journey management, done seriously, requires collaboration across teams that don't naturally share budgets, priorities, or language. It needs either a top-down mandate or unusual lateral alignment. Most organizations have neither consistently in place.

Building the infrastructure for a discipline

The I4JM answer to all of this is institution-building — creating the shared language, education, and professional community that other mature disciplines take for granted.

Smith co-founded the institute with Ray Gerber, a figure he describes with some amusement as his arch-rival for 15 years. The two ran competing companies in the journey management space, and were arch-rivals who discovered, when they finally sat down together, that they aligned almost completely on the substance. "We actually agree on pretty much everything," Smith said. "At least when it comes to journey management."

Between them, they have decades of experience guiding enterprises through journey programs across industries. The I4JM packages that experience into structured education for executives around transformation and change, and deeper practitioner training for the teams doing the work.

The institute is a non-profit, deliberately structured to serve the industry rather than any commercial interest. It is building communities for business leaders, practitioners, and the broader ecosystem of vendors, consultancies, and implementation partners. And it is focused, above all, on the problem Smith returned to repeatedly: How to get executives to understand what they stand to gain. "It's usually about the money," he said. "They've got to be able to see the value."

From momentum to maturity

Beyond the Map was, in many ways, the ideal room for Smith to make his case. Surrounded by journey managers, service designers, and transformation leaders from some of the world's largest organizations, he wasn't preaching to skeptics. He was laying down a challenge to people who already believe — and who are already doing the work — to help make journey management impossible to ignore at the executive level.

That's the I4JM bet: that the discipline doesn't need more proof. It needs infrastructure. Common language, executive education, professional certification, and a community that holds the standard. The kind of scaffolding that turns a promising practice into a recognized profession. The value has been demonstrated. The next step is making it undeniable.

Beyond the Map 2026 is where this conversation continues. You'll want to be in the room.

Get your early bird ticket → valid until 31 of May.

Mark Smith is co-founder of the Institute for Journey Management Institute (I4JM), a non-profit dedicated to advancing journey management as a professional discipline. Find out more at www.i4jm.org.