The truth about journey management: It’s not about mapping

Journey Management is having a moment, but not for the reasons you might think. Despite the rise in journey-centric roles and tooling, many enterprise organizations still haven’t unlocked its true potential.

According to Martin Palamarz, Co-founder at TheyDo and a veteran of 20 years in enterprise consultancy, there’s a fundamental misunderstanding at play. “If you think journey management is just about orchestrating content, insights, and metrics across journeys or making inventories of company touchpoints, you’re missing the bigger picture,” he says.

So, what is the bigger picture?

Let’s take a look.

Journey management ≠ journey mapping

Journey mapping might be where many teams begin, but it’s not where the real transformation happens.

Most enterprises Martin’s worked with focus on improving isolated touchpoints or enhancing CX metrics. While helpful, these efforts often fall into what he calls “journey theater,” a big visual show with no substance. “I often see organizations mapping customer touchpoints, creating journey slides, and building dashboards no one uses,” Martin explains. “It looks good, but doesn’t deliver business impact.”

Journey management as an operating system

What separates real journey management from journey theater? It’s the shift from static artifacts to dynamic systems that power decision-making. At TheyDo, we built our platform to solve exactly this: making journey data a living, breathing source of truth that supports how work actually gets done across teams. As Martin puts it, “This isn’t about adding another journey mapping tool. It’s about helping organizations turn journey insights into validated business impact solutions.”

What real journey management looks like

True journey management isn’t a CX initiative. It’s a new way of operating.

1. Operational integration

Journeys become the organizational blueprint. Everyone—from design to strategy—works from a shared source of truth that reflects customer and business priorities.

2. Actionable intelligence

Static maps become dynamic dashboards that fuel action, not just reflection.

3. Journey AI

Beyond generating insights, AI transforms raw qualitative data into a shared, real-time view of your customer experience, helping everyone stay aligned.

4. Cross-functional alignment

Journeys act as a common language across teams, creating clarity and momentum that breaks down silos for good. Martin notes, “Creating a shared workflow between design, product, and business teams is no longer a dream; it’s an operational necessity.”

How to make it work

If you’re serious about shifting from projects to journeys, Martin recommends three things:

1. Start with a business pain

“Your business performance pain defines the scope of what journeys you need to cover, not the other way around,” says Martin.

That means identifying the performance issues that matter most, assigning ownership, and setting up governance with teeth—the kind that can actually drive decisions across teams.

2. Enable with AI

Surface-level insights are easy to come by. But AI helps you go deeper, connecting dots across journeys, not just touchpoints.

3. Transform your culture

Move from project-based thinking to journey-based prioritization. Empower your journey governance team to act on opportunities that serve both customer outcomes and business results.

Think big. Start small. Scale fast.

“Focus on the opportunity,” Martin advises. “Because they break down silos, enable cross-functional workflows, and deliver solutions with guaranteed product-market fit.” If you start with a clearly scoped pain point and align your teams around the opportunities within it, the results follow.

Track what matters: journey performance, team alignment, business outcomes. And of course, strive to continuously improve.

The takeaway

Journey management isn’t about managing journey maps. It’s about managing your business through journeys. "The future of business isn't about managing departments, products, or even customers in isolation,” Martin says. “It's about managing journeys as the fundamental unit of value creation.”

That’s the shift. That’s the opportunity. “That's what real journey management looks like."