The octopus in the town square: Learnings from a journey ops practitioner

At the first Beyond the Map event, Pfizer’s Customer Journey Operations Lead, Grace de Athayde, took the stage to name the octopus in the room: JourneyOps. It’s the unglamorous, persistent work nobody likes to talk about, but that regulated enterprises depend on to make journey management work, and stick.

“When we’re enabling journey management in an organization,” De Athayde said, “what I want to create is a place where people can meet, do their journey check-ins, and resolve problems through a vibrant practice.”

To explain what that looks like in practice, de Athayde borrowed an image from McKinsey & Company’s report Redesigning the design department (2022): the vibrant town square. Unlike fortified castles or ivory towers, a town square is designed for collision. People meet on purpose and by accident. You run into colleagues you didn’t plan to see. Conversations happen that weren’t on the agenda. Problems surface, get worked through, and move forward because the work is out in the open and shared.

In this picture, JourneyOps is the octopus that keeps that town square functioning and flowing. One tentacle reaches upward, translating journey management for senior leaders, framing it in business terms, and building credibility without triggering “another initiative” fatigue. Another stretches sideways, aligning legal, procurement, IT, and compliance so that the work can actually move forward. A third stays firmly in the operational mud, managing the platform, running office hours, building playbooks, and smoothing friction before momentum stalls.

Why big organizations abandon journey management

De Athayde’s perspective is shaped by time spent inside large, complex companies. Before Pfizer, she worked inside organizations with decades, and sometimes centuries, of history. From industrial manufacturing to global consumer brands, these environments share a reality of layered structures, rigid funding models, and deeply embedded ways of working that make cross-functional work hard to sustain.

Journey work, by nature, cuts across teams, functions, and budgets. That becomes a problem in organizations designed to reward clear ownership and contained scope. When work cannot be neatly assigned to a single team, it struggles to survive.

In embedded models, where funding and accountability sit with product teams, journey initiatives stall when they do not map cleanly to a roadmap or a cost center. In in-house agency models, strategists and researchers are allocated project by project. When the project ends, often before implementation, the journey ends with it.

Maps are created, reviewed, admired, and then archived.

At Pfizer, De Athayde encountered a team that had been trying to implement journey management for three years. “They had a lot of focus on what I call standardization town,” De Athayde said. “There are a lot of stories in our industry of teams that are only seeking the hierarchy and not business results.”

This one had worked with multiple consulting firms and cycled through platforms. Yet they could not point to business results, or even internal efficiencies, one of the most basic promises of journey management.

So she decided to change the energy.

Go play: Rebuilding momentum from the ground up

De Athayde began by onboarding teams by telling them to “Go play.” They formed small pods and committed to regular check-ins, creating just enough accountability to keep the work moving. Weekly office hours gave people a place to bring real questions. And instead of prescribing what a journey should look like, she watched what teams actually built, then pulled standards from what worked in practice.

New to pharma herself, De Athayde’s approach was both strategic and humble. “What business do I have telling you how a journey in pharma should look?” she asked. But the effect was also cultural. By lowering the bar to entry, she removed the fear of doing it wrong, breaking something, or being judged for unfinished work.

She reinforced progress and gave teams public recognition through “journey management awards” that celebrated everything from brave first attempts to strong collaboration, experimentation, and improvement.  

The octopus keeps it all moving when reality hits

Then, inevitably, priorities shifted. A new year brought new mandates, and previously “managed” journeys slipped out of focus. A first attempt at a centralized playbook, built by an external agency, was abstract, too hard to apply, and so landed flat. De Athayde did not frame this as a failure. Instead, she recognized that the environment had changed, so JourneyOps had to adapt.

She diversified the effort, launching new pilots with local markets while continuing to stabilize the core practice. She pushed through the long approval process required to introduce Journey AI and rebuilt the playbook from scratch.

Instead of showcasing what “good” looked like, Playbook 2.0 spelled out what teams should do next. And perhaps most importantly, De Athayde began documenting JourneyOps itself, creating a handbook so the responsibility for keeping journey management moving could be shared. 

Making “management” concrete with three verbs

One of De Athayde’s most effective contributions was simplifying how journey management is explained. Instead of abstract frameworks, she described it in three verbs:

Organize: Bring journeys out of PowerPoint decks and scattered boards into one place. Align on taxonomy just enough to make work comparable and searchable.

Act: Define roles clearly: viewers, contributors, owners, and global owners. Invite participation rather than enforcing it. Use AI and lightweight governance to keep journeys current.

Track: Connect metrics to journeys so teams can see whether the changes they prioritize are actually working.

This framing gave teams something to do tomorrow morning and turned nodding agreement into action.

Metrics change the conversation

Within many enterprises, data lives everywhere: Tableau dashboards, Power BI reports, Snowflake tables, Excel files. Everyone had numbers, but no one had a shared view.

De Athayde’s team took inventory of what metrics already existed, where they lived, and who actually used them. From there, they prioritized what was relevant and feasible for specific journeys. Once teams understood the metrics and agreed on what they meant, automation followed.

When business stakeholders finally saw metrics embedded directly into journeys, sometimes dozens at once, a light bulb went off. For the first time, experience signals, operational data, and business outcomes sat side by side. Patterns became obvious, so trade-offs were easier to see. Finally, decisions could finally be made on evidence, not opinion.

Building a town square worth returning to

The clearest signal that the practice was taking hold came during stakeholder interviews with senior leaders. They did not just endorse journey management; they asked for it. This was no longer a pilot or a grassroots experiment. Journey management had crossed into expectation because the business had begun to rely on it.

De Athayde closed her presentation at Beyond the Map with an invitation: Build a town square that people want to return to. Make the work visible. Keep it moving. And accept that, in every real organization, someone or some team will need to play octopus.

Some days that means translating the value for senior leaders without triggering “another initiative” fatigue. Other days, it means navigating governance, unblocking approvals, or running office hours so teams can keep going. Sometimes it means rebuilding a playbook that didn’t land. Occasionally, it means making stickers with a Cricut machine to bring a little joy back into the work.

Most of the time, it means doing the work no one applauds. It’s simply what journey management looks like when someone is accountable for making it work inside a real organization.