Fall is associated with a lot of things: back-to-school, harvests, Halloween and Thanksgiving, even pumpkin-spice lattes!
But for me, fall is budget season. It’s the time of year I get to hear about all of my clients’ innovative new ideas and their upcoming initiatives. I help them prepare their pitches for leadership and plan for what we’ll be working on together in the new year.
I love to hear about where those innovative initiative ideas come from. Some clients like to crowd-source new ideas from their employees, while others have platoons of bespoke-suit-wearing analysts. Some clients study new technology for inspiration. Some monitor competitors or the market. Others like to look across industries for analogies they can borrow. And some seem to just wait for a flash of brilliance in the shower!
But I’ve observed that one of the most successful ways to drive innovation is to create journey maps. Journey maps are a way to document how a person interacts with a company, organization, product, or service. The journey map documents people’s actions, as well as support tools, motivations, influences, etc. Journey maps are a great tool to see your business from a fresh perspective and can help to identify opportunity areas or pain points.
So, in honor of budget season, here are four pieces of advice about journey maps, for the novice or the expert.
1. Create journey maps for all your stakeholders. Include employees, partners, influencers, etc. Each have a journey with actions and thoughts, and each need support. Looking internally or at peripheral stakeholders can help you see things from a new perspective.
2. Set goals for what you want your journey map to accomplish. When you’re ready to share those journey maps, be thoughtful about what content to share. Do you want your audience to evaluate the entire journey or just a piece? Do you want to focus on all aspects, just what the actor needs to know, or on behind-the-curtain activities? Be deliberate in your format to both provide enough context to spark creative thinking and help readers focus in on where the opportunities may lie.
3. Find a format that works. Journey maps can be complicated—there are actor activities and milestones, think/do/know/feel notes, relationship maps, customer touchpoints, and behind-the-curtain activities, all mapped across phases and time. When building a journey map, it’s great to work with sticky notes and whiteboards, beginning with activities and milestones, and layering in additional content as you build. After you’ve worked out all of your elements, transcribe everything to a shareable format. Simple journeys might present best as a list, flow charts are great for process journeys, and storyboards can help readers really connect to the actors’ emotional states.
4. Show your journey maps to others. Don’t keep those journey maps tucked away in the marketing department. Focus groups, targeted interviews with stakeholders, and internal reviews can help you uncover missing or hidden parts or find new pain points or opportunities.
If you want to talk more about journey maps or where your inspiration comes from, I’d love to hear it. Happy budgeting!