Journey mapping hit its wall. TheyDo broke through it

How a new enterprise discipline emerged from a problem no tool could solve.

Six overcaffeinated CX leads are crammed into a conference room, the kind enterprises reserve for “innovation days.” A massive whiteboard dominates the space, plastered with orange, yellow, pink, and neon-green sticky notes. Their colors echo the Skittles spilling from a bulk-sized bag on a nearby table. The vibe is chaotic, creative, and utterly routine. After all, this is the modern enterprise ritual.

By the mid-2020s, journey mapping had evolved into its own kind of corporate theatre: part creativity sprint, part offsite energy, part collective optimism. Teams wrapped their workshops, snapped photos of the walls, and saved the map.

But on Monday morning, nothing changed.Until now.

“Journey mapping was never the endgame,” says Jochem van der Veer, cofounder and CEO of TheyDo. “Enterprises didn’t need more maps. They needed a way to connect their data, their decisions, and their delivery.”

That insight exposed a structural gap in the enterprise stack; a missing discipline that would soon have a name: journey management.

And in 2025, with the publication of The Forrester Wave™: Customer Journey Management Platforms, Q4 2025, that discipline received its clearest validation yet. Forrester formally recognized journey management as a standalone category and evaluated the platforms built to support it. In that inaugural assessment, TheyDo was named a Leader, earning the highest Strategy score and perfect marks in business impact, ROI analysis, integration, coordination, and AI.

But to understand why this moment matters, you have to understand what came before it.

Why journey mapping hit its wall

For years, journey mapping played the role enterprises needed it to play. It helped teams visualize customer experiences, build empathy, and uncover friction. It brought people together across silos in a way few other methods could. At its best, mapping was catalytic: it illuminated what no dashboard ever could.

But the method carried an unspoken flaw: It wasn’t built for execution.

Inside global enterprises, the same breakdowns appeared with startling consistency: Maps were static. Customers weren’t.

By the time a journey map circulated through a steering committee (or worse, through procurement), it was already outdated. Customer expectations shifted; operations changed; the map stayed frozen in a moment that had already passed.

Insights were isolated from systems of record.

The problems identified in a workshop didn’t make their way into Jira tickets or Azure DevOps workflows. Engineers never saw them. Product managers couldn’t prioritize them. Leaders couldn’t tie them to outcomes.

Teams left the room aligned (and then re-entered their silos).

Mapping created harmony for a day. But when Monday arrived, marketing chased leads, product teams chased roadmaps, operations chased efficiency. The shared understanding dissolved under competing priorities.

Executives asked for ROI; maps couldn’t answer.

Leaders didn’t want more sticky notes on walls. They wanted evidence:

• What’s the financial impact?

• What’s the upside?

• What should we do first?

• What happens if we don’t?

Journey maps could describe experiences, but they couldn’t quantify them. Mapping was a tool (and an important one!), but it wasn’t a management system.

The journey management breakthrough

To manage customer experience at enterprise scale, companies needed more than a visualization. They needed a system of record, a decision engine, and a coordination layer, all anchored in journeys. Journey management emerged to fill that void.

1. It connected journeys to real-time data.

Structured and unstructured. VoC. Support logs. Operational metrics. Product analytics. Research. All interpreted through the customer journey.

2. It linked insights directly to execution.

For the first time, opportunities didn’t disappear into slide decks. They flowed directly into Jira, Azure DevOps, ServiceNow, and other systems where teams actually work.

3. It aligned teams through a common context.

Journeys became the connective fabric—giving every function the same truth, the same priorities, the same language.

4. It quantified impact.

Opportunities were no longer wish lists. They had modeled ROI, cost savings, and business value built in.

5. It scaled.

Lifecycle → journeys → microjourneys → operational workflows. All connected. All alive. All governed.

Mapping showed the problem. Journey management built the system to solve it.

For van der Veer, this was the shift that changed everything:

“The enterprise didn’t have a place where customer reality met business reality. We built the layer where those things finally connect.”

How TheyDo built the discipline (and the platform)

 As teams became masters at mapping journeys, they still struggled to operationalize them. Journey management emerged because enterprises were identifying problems without the right tools to fix them. The founders of TheyDo kept seeing the same pattern: Every major company had insights, data, and good intentions, but no way to convert them into coordinated action. The missing piece wasn’t customer understanding. It was organizational alignment. Building that layer required three things that no existing tool provided: A new mental model, an entirely different architecture, and a discipline to guide how teams work.

Journeys as the operating system

Inside enterprises, workflows run through functions: marketing, product, engineering, operations, and service. Data flows through systems: CRMs, CDPs, BI dashboards, and ticketing platforms. Customers move through journeys. And as long as those two realities remained misaligned, no amount of mapping could close the gap.

To fix the mismatch, journeys had to become more than diagrams. They had to become the operating system that links:

Data → What’s happening Insights → Why it matters Decisions → What to prioritize Execution → Who does the work Impact → What changed

In other words: a single, shared context that connects understanding to action, and action to outcomes.

A new architecture for a new kind of work

Turning journeys into the enterprise operating system required more than better visualization. It required a platform built on relationships, context, and continuous change, something no existing category of tools was designed to handle.

Journey management demanded an architecture capable of doing five things at once:

1. Structure complexity without flattening it

Enterprises have dozens of journeys: lifecycle → journeys → microjourneys → steps → opportunities. A journey management platform had to mirror this hierarchy and keep it connected, coherent, and governed across teams, business units, and geographies.

2. Unify data, regardless of source or structure

Support tickets, VoC, product analytics, NPS, research reports, call transcripts, logs — none of it holds value if it sits in separate systems. Journey management required a way to bring all that data into the same context and make it intelligible through AI.

3. Translate insights into work

The enterprise moves through Jira, Azure DevOps, and ServiceNow, not through PDFs. A true journey system needed to be bi-directionally integrated with those tools so that insights became tasks, tasks rolled into initiatives, and everything synced automatically.

4. Coordinate decision-making across silos

Big companies don’t fail because they lack insight. They fail because no team knows what the others are doing. Journey management required a collaboration model where each team could contribute from its system of record, but still operate from the same customer truth.

5. Measure impact in real time

Executives needed more than empathy. They needed evidence. What’s the value of fixing this friction point? What’s the cost of ignoring it? What changed after we acted? Journey management had to close the loop — continuously.

A multi-tasking mapping tool

The platform enterprises needed wasn’t a better mapping tool. It was a system capable of doing five things at once: structuring complexity, unifying data, translating insights into work, coordinating decisions across silos, and measuring impact in real time.

No existing category was built for that, so TheyDo made a foundational choice:

Journeys wouldn’t live inside a tool. The tool would live inside journeys.

That shift, simple to articulate, radical to engineer, became the hinge moment that made journey management possible and paved the way for the category’s formal recognition.

The discipline that changed how teams work

Once journeys became the organizing layer, everything inside the enterprise began to shift. Workshops gave way to workflows. Insights weren’t captured and archived; they were captured and acted on. Teams that once worked in functional silos suddenly had a shared context that transcended their org chart.

For the first time, a product manager, a CX lead, and a service owner could look at the same journey and see, simultaneously:

• What customers were experiencing

• What the data confirmed

• Which initiatives were already underway

• Where the biggest opportunities sat

• How each decision would impact the rest of the experience.

This wasn’t just a new tool. It was a new discipline, one that turned journeys from static artifacts into a living operating system for decision-making.

“Teams don’t argue about priorities anymore,” one enterprise customer told TheyDo. “We argue about the journey — and the journey always wins.”

A victory beyond validation 

You know a new practice has crossed into legitimacy when an analyst firm draws a box around it and gives it a name. That moment arrived in 2025, when Forrester released The Forrester Wave™: Customer Journey Management Platforms, Q4 2025.

For the first time, journey management was recognized as a standalone category, distinct from mapping, research, or design. It acknowledged what enterprises had been feeling for years: that better understanding alone wasn’t enough. They needed a system that connected insights → action → ROI.

In that inaugural evaluation, TheyDo was named a Leader, earning the highest Strategy score and perfect marks in business impact, ROI analysis, integration, coordination, and AI, a validation of the architectural bet TheyDo made years earlier.

Recognition wasn’t the victory. It was the signal that the discipline had tipped. The industry finally saw what enterprises had been discovering on their own: journeys weren’t artifacts. They were infrastructure.

The AI-powered, enterprise-scale future

Enterprises now produce more data, decisions, and cross-functional dependencies than any human team can track manually. Journey management provides the context, while AI provides the acceleration.

TheyDo’s next chapter is defined by technologies that don’t just describe journeys, but continuously interpret, prioritize, and shape them:

• Agentic AI that surfaces opportunities before teams go looking for them.

• Automated insight mining that turns scattered data into structured intelligence.

• Bi-directional integration that connects decisions to delivery in real time.

• Continuous ROI measurement that shows leaders (not just CX teams) what changed.

“AI lets us close the loop,” says van der Veer. “Not in months, but in minutes. If journey management is the operating model, AI is the engine that makes it scale.”

For enterprises, this is a transformation from reactive problem-solving to a proactive, journey-based strategy.  

The next category shift has already started

What began as a whiteboard full of sticky notes has become an enterprise operating system. With Forrester’s recognition, the discipline is no longer emerging; it’s established. Journey management bridges silos, drives alignment, and turns experience into measurable business outcomes. And now AI is making it dynamic, predictive, and continuously improving.

For those ready to break through the whiteboard-mapping wall, journey management is the operating model that finally connects the enterprise around the customer.

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