Key concepts

Overview

TheyDo is built around a structured set of building blocks and a shared methodology for turning customer experience data into decisions. This article introduces each concept, explains what it does, and shows how it connects to the rest of the system.

Building blocks

Building blocks are the core objects in TheyDo. They're how you capture, organize, and act on everything you know about your customer experience.

Each building block has a specific job. But what makes them powerful is how they connect. When building blocks are mapped to journey steps, they gain context — an insight placed alongside a metric at the same step tells a richer story than either does on its own. This is the foundation of how TheyDo works: structured context that builds up across your journeys over time.

Building blocks can be created independently and reused across multiple journeys.

Journeys

A journey represents what a customer does, thinks, and feels across a set of touchpoints. Journeys are organized into phases and steps, and they act as the context layer that connects every other building block.

Journeys in TheyDo are not static deliverables — they're living systems that teams maintain, update, and use to drive decisions over time. When all your building blocks are organized around the journey, the experience data your organization holds stops being siloed and starts being useful.

Quotes

Quotes are raw customer verbatims — direct evidence captured from interviews, surveys, support tickets, call transcripts, or any other research source. A quote is a fixed observation tied to a specific moment in time: what a customer said, as they said it.

Quotes are the foundation of evidence in TheyDo. They feed into insights, giving them a traceable basis you can always point back to.

Insights

Insights are the interpreted synthesis of customer evidence. Where a quote captures what one person said, an insight captures a pattern — a need, pain, gain, or observation that holds across multiple data points.

Insights are linked to specific journey steps so context is always clear. In TheyDo, insights can be mined from uploaded data sources using AI, or created manually.

Opportunities

Opportunities represent the problems and experience gaps worth solving. They sit between what you know (insights) and what you'll do about it (solutions) — typically framed as "How might we…" statements.

Opportunities are prioritized using customer value, business value, and effort scores. The opportunity matrix helps teams make clear, evidence-based decisions about what to work on next.

Solutions

Solutions are the initiatives, features, experiments, or process changes your team is working on to address opportunities. Connecting solutions to opportunities — and opportunities to journeys — means you can always trace back why something is being built, and measure whether it actually made a difference.

Metrics

Metrics attach quantitative data to journey steps. They answer: how is this part of the experience actually performing?

Metrics can be pulled in from integrations (like Qualtrics, Snowflake, or Databricks) or added manually. Placed alongside qualitative insights at the same journey step, they give teams both the what (the numbers) and the why (the customer context) in one place.

Goals

Goals connect journey work to business outcomes. They give teams the strategic anchor to stay focused on what matters — and a way to track whether improvements are making a measurable difference at the business level.

Personas

Personas represent the customer segments your journeys are built around. Attaching personas to insights and opportunities lets you compare experiences across different customer types and surface where the biggest gaps are.

Documents

Documents are free-form pages that live inside TheyDo and can be attached to journeys or building blocks. They're useful for research summaries, meeting notes, project briefs, or any supporting context. Documents can also be generated directly from journey data using Ask TheyDo.

The Triple Diamond

The Triple Diamond is the decision-making methodology TheyDo is built around. It describes how building blocks connect across three phases — from identifying a problem to delivering and measuring a solution.

Problem Discovery Teams gather and interpret qualitative data, surface insights, and connect them to the relevant journey steps. The goal is to understand what customers are actually experiencing — and frame the most meaningful problems clearly. Goals and metrics provide the business context that guides where to focus first.

Solution Discovery With insights in place, teams create opportunities — structured problem statements that describe what to improve and why. Opportunities are then prioritized using the opportunity matrix, which weighs customer value, business value, and effort. This is where teams decide what to work on next.

Solution Delivery Teams create solutions linked to their opportunities, track progress, and measure impact using metrics. Because every solution traces back through opportunities to the journey, teams can see exactly what changed — and whether it worked.

The Triple Diamond is not a linear process. Teams move through it continuously as new data arrives, insights evolve, and priorities shift.

Glossary

Journey framework The hierarchy that organizes all journeys in your workspace — from high-level lifecycle stages down to detailed micro journeys. It gives everyone a shared overview and lets teams zoom in and out without losing context.

Phases and steps Phases group the major sections of a journey (e.g. Onboarding, Decision, Renewal). Steps are the individual moments within each phase — what the customer is actually doing or experiencing at that point. Building blocks are always connected to a specific step.

Lanes Lanes are the rows inside a journey that hold different types of content. Each lane corresponds to a building block type — metrics, experience, insights, opportunities, and solutions. They give every stakeholder a clear view of their relevant layer without losing the full picture.

Taxonomy Taxonomy is the shared vocabulary for your workspace — including tags, statuses, groups, and types. A consistent taxonomy makes it easier to filter, search, and compare building blocks across journeys.

Tags Tags are labels you can apply to building blocks to make them easier to find and filter. Common examples include channel tags (e.g. Channel: Email), job-to-be-done tags, or team ownership tags.

Views Views are saved filter configurations that let teams see a focused slice of their journey data — for example, all insights tagged as pains, or all high-priority opportunities assigned to a specific team.