From insights to an operating system: How Autodesk is rebuilding innovation around journeys

When Florian Vollmer, Director of Insights at Autodesk, spoke at Beyond the Map 2025, his message was straightforward: Journey management is not about reducing complexity. It’s about learning how to work inside it.

Vollmer framed journey management as a human operating model; a way for people, teams, and systems to collaborate, share context, and make decisions in environments that are already deeply interconnected. The challenge, he explained, is creating the conditions where journeys can guide action at scale.

That perspective was grounded in experience. In his early days as an industrial design student learning AutoCAD (long before Autodesk became a $6B global company serving architects, engineers, manufacturers, and media creators worldwide), design management then focused on form, function, and authorship.

Today, Vollmer maintains that approach no longer fits the reality organizations face. “We’re no longer managing objects or spaces,” he explained. “We’re managing systems of systems. Users, stakeholders, platforms, partners. That changes the role of design entirely.”

At Autodesk, his one-person journey management effort evolved into an experience insights practice responsible for front of house to back of house, customer to partner, and insight to action. 

The failure that shaped the practice

In one of the Autodesk team’s first major internal journey readouts, they presented all the data, insights, and context at once, overwhelming the Stakeholders. They struggled to see what mattered, let alone what to do next.

This early misstep helped Vollmer and his team recognize that journey management should be measured by how clearly insight enables action. 

Culture change, not tooling

As the practice matured, the team moved from intake to co-creation, from sharing insights to recommending opportunities, and from “what I know” to “what I share.”

It was a cultural shift that soon picked up speed.  What once required three months of analysis could now be delivered in days, and sometimes in near real time. With that shift, journey management became the infrastructure through which innovation decisions were made.

The human roles that make journeys work

One of the most compelling parts of the session was Vollmer’s breakdown of the roles that sustain a journey management practice.

• The ever-curious pattern spotter

• The storyteller who translates complexity

• The connector who creates collisions

• The facilitator who enables co-creation

• The skeptic who sharpens the work

• The “librarian” who protects the signal from noise

“What matters isn’t the title,” Vollmer said. “It’s how people show up.” He likened the practice to a living system where users contribute, validate, and refine shared knowledge in motion.  

Scaling without losing the thread

As Autodesk scaled the practice, a clear yet flexible structure emerged:

• Horizontal journey managers ensuring consistency across touchpoints

• Vertical journey managers driving new capabilities and service design

• A community of practice (not a traditional center of excellence)

• Clear governance that balances flexibility with rigor

Importantly, not everyone needs to be a journey manager, and not every conversation needs a workshop. Some teams own repositories of insight, others focus on execution. Journey managers sit in the middle, intentionally shifting between discovery, design, and continuous listening.  

Journeys as decision infrastructure

Today, journeys at Autodesk shape software architecture, inform design decisions, and increasingly provide the context for executive conversations. As Autodesk integrates additional product groups into the model, journey management is becoming the connective tissue that enables innovation to happen faster, together, and with less friction.

When leaders stop asking for slide decks and start asking to see the journey, Vollmer said, journey management has moved from insight to impact.