User Journeys for Product Leaders: Proto-Journey Maps for Smart Strategy
A journey map offers your team a way to identify how your product will change your users’ worlds. It helps you document their pain points, and fix them. The best part? It doesn’t have to be a heavy lift. This journey mapping process gets you the results you need in one afternoon.
Documenting the end-to-end journey your users take to complete the job they’re trying to do is essential. Your product lives in the context of someone’s everyday life: by observing and documenting this messy lived reality, you uncover any “unknowns unknowns” that could compromise your success. Throughout my time in the field, however, I’ve witnessed many leaders having to fly without this essential guide to customer pain points, ecosystems and opportunities. In their minds, the heavy lift of hiring a researcher to pull this together is more than they can afford. They often call me in after release, to figure out why they’re struggling with adoption of sa July brilliant proiduct or getting support calls for a release they thought was debugged. And they’re surprised to hear that without an extensive research deep-dive, I can set them up for success in a single afternoon.
The key? A deliverable I call a proto-journey map.
You’ve been talking to your customers, and you have a pretty good sense of where they’re coming from. Without a dedicated research team, you don’t have time or money for more formal research. A proto-journey maps leverages the domain knowledge of product leaders and other internal experts who understand the lived experience of users. In scientific terms, it is a hypothesis: we begin with the question of who needs this product, their triggers for using it, the steps they take to use it, and the assessment phase in which they decide their satisfaction or frustration with the product’s performance. All together, this is usually something like a 6- to 10- step process, in which they may be using other tools, consulting other people, or going online to learn as they go. In each of these phases, you have an opportunity to eliminate pain points and meet your users where they are.
A proto-journey map unlocks holistic product strategy
helps product leaders align with each other
gives engineering the context they need
anticipates improvements that can be made after release
takes a few hours, not the weeks or months involved with UX discovery
wins stakeholders as it illustrates customer pain points and your solutions
benchmarks improvements in customer experience
