This is the Nielsen Norman Group UX Podcast.
I'm Therese Fessenden. A common term
in UX research and design is a journey.
It's an interesting word if you think about it.
When we also have words like workflow,
task flow, screen flow,
and even user flow,
which all indicate some flow
of small steps that users or customers take.
But journey implies something a bit more involved,
a bit larger than a series of small steps.
It suggests stages of accomplishment,
enlightenment, transformation.
Call it romanticizing, but if I'm honest,
the term journey captures the very essence of UX work
that we consider not just a brief series of clicks and taps
when we design for people,
but rather we consider the whole human
and the broad context they're navigating.
Now that's great and all,
but what if you have multiple users or customers?
And what if you have multiple journeys
to track and iterate?
How do you manage all of that?
To explore this topic,
we invited our very own Kim Salazar and Jochen van der Veer.
Kim is a senior UX specialist with NNG.
She's our resident omni-channel UX and CX expert,
who's been dedicating much of her research
to understanding not just the customer journey,
but how teams can operationalize the work needed
to manage them.
We also have Jochen van der Veer.
Jochen is the CEO of TheyDo,
a customer journey management platform
which connects people, processes, and products,
and turns them into CX opportunities.
With over 10 years of experience in UX design
and service design,
Jochen has insights into some of the most common challenges
that designers and researchers face
when trying to make sense of massive quantities
of research data.
In this episode, we do a little recap
of what customer journeys are,
then dive right in to what customer journey management is,
what might hinder teams from becoming more journey-centric,
and most crucially, how teams can get started
being more deliberate about journey management work.
Welcome to our podcast, Jochen and Kim.
So I would love for both of you
to tell us a bit about yourselves.
So how did you end up working in journey management?
Yeah, hi, Therese.
My name is Kim Salazar.
I'm a senior UX specialist at NNG.
My focus area was on longitudinal experience design.
So I was talking a lot about
how to design omni-channel journeys
so that they were effortless and enjoyable.
And over the last six, seven years
where I've been teaching audiences that topic,
it always came back to,
how do we actually do this in practice?
How do we do this internally in an organization?
We're not built to collaborate.
We're not built to work across functional groups.
So that led me through a lot of research
and time working with clients
and talking to people in different organizations to learn
how they were overcoming those challenges
and try to help clients design operations and practices
to ensure that they were investing in the journey
and helping to set up their resources
and teams and processes in a way
that they could really actually make a difference
and execute on the stuff that makes a good customer journey.
Yeah, and related to that,
just for the folks who are maybe newer to user experience,
when you say omni-channel journeys,
in like a one sentence definition,
how would you explain that?
It really is just a set of interactions
that people go through to achieve a larger goal.
And it happens over time.
So if you're filing a claim with insurance,
you might first file online, get an email,
make a phone call, get a check in the mail,
all those interactions together make a journey experience
and they happen in different places.
Sometimes it's on a cell phone,
sometimes it's on a website email.
So that's what makes it omni-channel.
I see.
So basically managing all of these different channels
means a couple of things.
Obviously you can have one journey on many channels,
but you can also have many journeys on even more channels.
So I can see how that is an increasing concern
is how do we even start to manage these things?
Exactly.
As somebody who has been talking about journey management
in abstract for several years,
it was very nice when Joachim and I
kind of stumbled upon each other's expertise
when Joachim introduced they do to me
was it actually makes journey management seem tangible.
You can see it.
And for people who kind of understand what it is
and the concept, but it's still very undefined
and there's not a lot out there
and everybody's trying to figure out
how do we do this within our organization,
having the tool and looking at it and saying,
oh, okay, there's sort of a light bulb moment
that I see with people to say, that makes sense.
Now that I see it, now there's this tool
that is putting visual things around these concepts
that we're talking about.
It starts to kind of solidify people's understanding
of what we're trying to achieve.
So that's, I was really excited when I found that
Joachim and his team were out there
and working in the same space that I was
and that's gonna help propel this problem space forward
and create solutions for everybody
who's trying to tackle this challenge.
Yeah, now, Joachim, could you tell us a bit
about how you got into this space?
Yeah, it's always great to hear Kim share her story
because my trajectory was similar,
although I didn't come from research,
but I came from a design background.
I've been a UX practitioner myself for many years
and starting small, building out little marketing websites,
little applications, and then going freelance,
getting bigger assignments and then at some point
found myself doing transformational work
with the Fortune 500 companies with a small team.
We got hired to do this customer-centric way of working
and we helped those teams to actually
embed a culture of design thinking,
use journeys and the practice of service blueprinting
to actually create that cross-functional alignment.
And I remember that at some project
I was standing in this major war room
where the board of directors was getting the presentation
of the customers where we did research with
and we had fantastic concepts to bring back to the business.
And I realized we are not doing
what we are supposed to be doing.
I mean, we are building a phenomenal consulting business.
I mean, we are doing great revenue, profitable business,
fantastic, but we go from project to project,
I start over again and over again and over again,
sometimes even in the same business,
like four or five times.
And we're like, is this really what we're about?
And we realized like the customer journey,
the way that Kim described it, right?
The set of actions that a customer takes to achieve a goal
can be used to organize effectively.
And we thought, hey, there must be some platforms, tools,
digital solutions out there to solve this.
And this was like pre-COVID, so Miro, Muralore,
and even a thing, and there was nothing.
You had journey mapping, like visualization of the journeys,
of the customer journeys, but there was nothing to even say,
like, how do we go from insight to implementation?
How do we collaborate?
How do we know what success looks like?
So we started building out something
for our little agency, it was not little at the time,
it was doing fine, with the goal of actually expanding
the work we did.
And then our customer said, hmm, that's cool.
Can we also have that?
And can you teach us how to use it?
And that's where our data today actually came from.
So we stumbled upon journey management,
and now we're actually bringing it to the world
because it seems like everyone is figuring it out.
Yeah, that sounds like a really kind of insightful aha moment
to basically have these conversations with clients
and to see the same pattern over and over again,
that the idea of a customer journey and a customer journey
map, this visualization of what steps that person might take
across many different channels.
OK, it's great to visualize one, but how can we
make sense of many, and are there tools?
And you're right, before the pandemic, so before 2020,
not very many tools to really manage all of that.
So I guess that's kind of my follow-up question, which
would be, how would you describe or define customer journey
management as a skill?
It's almost like a management philosophy, right?
It's a decision of a company, or at least a majority
part of important folks at a company,
to say, hey, customer centricity, no-brainer to us.
Customer experience, we all want to be differentiating
ourselves against the competition on customer
experience.
I think we're past that.
But how do we get there?
And I think putting the emphasis on the journey,
like literally putting the customer journey,
and like you shared, there's hundreds of journeys to manage.
Putting them in the center and organizing around it
is, in a nutshell, what journey management is about.
And then you get into, OK, so how do we research?
How do we design?
How do we measure?
How do we plan?
How do we optimize all these journeys?
So you go into the operational aspects of it.
But it's really a management philosophy
of saying our business focuses around the customer journeys.
We organize around it.
We have shared responsibilities around it
and really put in resources and teams
around solving the customer journeys today
and the future journeys that we want to make possible.
What Joakim is talking about is really
why we're starting to hear more and more about journey
management in the discussion right now
is because a lot of organizations
are coming to this same realization right now.
I feel like we're at this tipping point almost,
where we've spent a lot of time over the last decade
or more investing in user-centered design
and UX at product levels.
And we've matured a lot.
A lot of organizations have really mature product
experiences.
But over that same time, the way that consumers and users
consume experiences has changed dramatically just
with the smartphone.
We are so much more embedded in our experiences now.
It's so much more immersive.
People don't differentiate between one interaction
on their phone and the interaction on their desktop
or something that happens five minutes later where they get
another notification.
We're always part of our experiences.
So that journey level that Joakim talked about
is so much more impactful on our lives than it used to be.
We used to be much more removed where we would go away and then
come back and interact.
It's part of us now.
It's part of our experience in the day-to-day.
So when it's not designed well, that really
is amplified nowadays.
So I think that that's why we're starting
to hear more about this at this time
because our customers are feeling the impact of that.
And we're realizing, oh, my goodness,
we can't just have great experiences at each product
or interaction level.
But the collective experience as a whole
is also really important.
And so we need to scale what we're doing,
our user-centered design thinking,
and take it up that level like Joakim's talking about
and really journey management is seeking
to help organizations apply that mindset
and work in a way that allows them to execute and design
good journeys.
Yeah, you had a really nice pause there, Joakim.
You said, like, customers are feeling,
and then you continue to sense.
But I think that is the pinnacle of it all, right?
Experience is about, how does it make people feel?
How does it make employees feel connected to their customers?
And that is like wishy-washy in business.
People cannot measure it.
We cannot quantify it.
And therefore, we don't really invest in it.
But putting the customer journey in the center,
then you have something tangible.
And you can actually manage it.
You can actually see what the impact is of the solutions you
bring to the market or the costs you're cutting because
you're efficient work together.
And I think that tangibility is now
getting foothold in management, even in the board, saying,
like, OK, hang on a minute.
This is how we actually enable our company
to be customer-centric and not only do it
on a strategic level, but actually also operate like it.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think I hear two big things.
One is the impact of not managing it well leads
to these kind of disjointed experiences.
And then the flip side is when companies do it well,
then you have this outcome where you
have measurable goals, measurable benchmarks,
and it becomes something a lot more tangible.
So I was wondering, it's kind of a follow-up to the impact.
What do you think is the negative impact?
Because we do see that there's value.
Being journey-centric brings value to an organization.
But I guess I'm curious, what happens
if you don't do it, and what exactly is that value?
So there's a few things that I can foresee.
I mean, I don't have this crystal ball
to show you what the future entails.
But if you don't do it, there's going
to be others that will, and they will out-compete you.
They will outperform you, and people naturally just
go with the root of the least friction.
So if you can get insurance with three clicks,
you'll do that rather than to go over email, call up,
visit an office.
And I mean, that's the obvious example.
So over time, the ones who invest in seamless journeys,
they will be the winners in whatever category field
or product space or solution space they are.
So that is one thing.
But the other risk is that, and I
know Kim speaks a lot about this,
is that people tend to make this big.
I mean, this can feel like a big transformation
of sorts, where your entire company is
going to run on journeys and put an emphasis on that.
So you can approach it two ways.
One is, let's start small.
And the other is, OK, we're going
to go totally to that side as a whole company.
And then people get scared.
They don't want to change.
And stuff gets awkward.
Absolutely.
Yeah, Kim, so related to that, what
is something that comes up quite often in the class
about these kind of impacts and maybe how
being journey-centric brings more value?
Yeah, that's always the biggest question,
Therese, among everybody right now, because this is really new.
And I think everybody's gut instinct
is this is the right way to go.
We've kind of known that.
People have always been looking for guidance and proof
and a playbook.
And it's very hard to measure return
on investment and experience.
At the product level, it's a little easier.
But now that we're saying we need
to invest in these longer experiences,
the question is, how do we know that our investment is
going to bring us return and that that is really
going to propel our business forward
and build business value?
So that's the big question.
There is starting to be data that within,
I mean, I've been studying this topic
and looking for data and proof that this does drive business
value for probably five years.
And I'm just starting to see research firms putting out
data, looking across industries over time,
and showing actual results, correlating performance
that companies have in terms of customer satisfaction
and calling out organizations that are being rated really
high among consumers in terms of the satisfaction they have
doing business with them and also their loyalty.
And then firms are starting to correlate that data
with actual performance data to say, OK,
not only are these companies satisfying their customers
and building loyalty among their customers,
but they're also outperforming their competitors
on lots of top level business metrics like revenue earned.
So these are all public business metrics that are out there.
So looking at revenue, stock prices, things like that.
So they have seen these themes, these trends
transcend across industries, where
we're seeing those companies that
are performing well for their customers
are also performing well in the business.
So that is a signal that we're really on to something.
So that's always the biggest question.
So yeah, actually, it seems like this is a no-brainer thing
to do.
Obviously, we want to have an experience
that people are talking about, that people are happy about,
excited about.
But surprisingly, not everyone does journey management
in the true sense.
So what would you say are the biggest hurdles
to establishing a journey management practice?
So the first things that a company
needs to do to get this off the ground
is actually invest in understanding
a few key journeys.
And that is not saying like, hey, we have a checkout journey,
we have a purchase journey, we have a buyer's journey,
we have a renewal journey, we have
these are the common journeys that we focus on.
OK, good.
Let's measure them.
And off we go.
No, it's really about understanding every step
of those key journeys.
But figuring out what are those key journeys
is already a challenge on its own for some organizations.
So I would say that picking those and understanding them
deeply, not only visualizing them as a journey,
literally step by step, and maybe the variations
or the scenarios within them, but then also understanding
how the business, how the processes, how the data,
and how the teams are organized to make that journey, which
whether it's a good journey, a bad journey,
it doesn't matter, but the journey as is,
how are we doing that as a company?
And that requires some time and investment
and some people that are skilled and also motivated to do this.
And that is, I think, what we're seeing now.
More and more companies are investing in this
and setting that up.
So together, we're figuring this out.
But having this in place is just the first step.
And then the second, and it also ties to what you just said
or just asked about, is the business impact there?
You can look at it on the top line or the bottom line
or the NPS and make it very big.
You can also make it very small, like, hey,
what can we actually drive for the customer effort
score in a particular, I don't know,
in this case, a purchase journey?
Do people experience high friction, low friction,
a lot of effort, not effort at all?
And if we change something, improve something,
whether it's in the product or actually around the product
experience, what is the impact of that?
And making it as tangible as you can do it
is very useful of making your first business case
to get it going and to get the flywheel of journey management
spinning rather than say, like, oh, we're going to improve NPS.
And then you're, like, one and a half years down the road
and you still don't know if you did it or someone else did it
or what actually influenced NPS.
Yeah.
Yeah, it definitely seems like picking really specific goals.
And I think you also spoke to something important, which
is picking a few journeys.
I think there's often the sense of overwhelm
when you first learn about journey mapping.
Then the immediate thought is, wow, this is a useful tool.
Let's map all the journeys.
There are going to be so many journeys that, frankly, you
can't map.
Or it's just not feasible to map all of the journeys,
but it's more important to pick a few key journeys,
it seems like.
Yeah, we had those discussions as well internally,
because ultimately you want to have all your journeys in place.
But one thing I'll say, and I'm curious also
to hear what Kim has to say and what she knows from the people
that join her course, because everyone is approaching it
slightly differently still, but understanding
the ultimate framework how all these journeys are pieced
together is not something you can ignore at the beginning.
You can start with a few key journeys.
That's great.
Then knowing that, hey, this is the big framework,
how everything fits together.
Here's three pieces of the puzzle I figured out.
It will give you an overview of, OK,
what is important to do next, but also to understand
what we don't know.
And I think those two things together
make for a great start.
It's not only like, hey, there's four key journeys
and maybe there's two more.
But trying to understand what all these other journeys might
be is also useful to get started.
Yeah, Kim, what are you seeing as far as,
I guess, what the biggest hurdles are in establishing
journey management practices?
I think we've talked a little bit about it already,
but the biggest hurdles is internal, more sentiment
culture, the way people are thinking about the way they
do their work.
It's so ingrained in us to be really product focused.
We're working in these fragmented organizational
functional groups, like marketing
is working together and product, and everybody's
kind of doing their own thing.
So when we come in and say, OK, journeys are important
and we want to be user centered and journey centric,
that kind of throws a stick in everybody's bicycle spokes.
And now everyone's like, oh, wait, how do we do that?
And what Joachim was talking about
is really investing in the journey and understanding it
and documenting those big key journeys as one step
to help people understand, OK, this
is how people are experiencing our products and services.
So we need to work around that rather than asking people
to experience around the way we work,
which would be more internal centric point of view.
So once we have this realization,
we have to kind of invest in building a culture around it,
understanding the appetite that the organization, specifically
leadership, has to invest in making some internal changes,
maybe structuring teams differently,
building some design operations to help people figure out
how they're supposed to collaborate,
to work together on fixing journeys.
And so there's a lot that we have to sort of explore
to say, OK, what is our leadership ready to do?
Who is compelled to help us make some decisions
and maybe sponsor a team or a set of resources
to do some exploratory work in this space?
So that's one of the biggest hurdles is figuring out
who your allies are and getting someone in leadership
to say, yes, let's do this.
And then once we've done that, how do we roll it out broader?
How do we scale it?
And so that's a bigger exploratory activity.
OK, now let's look across all the people
that we need to be part of this new way of working,
and how do we help them learn and train and invest
in things that's going to help people adopt their way
of working from the way they're used to doing things
so that we're all working together toward the same goal
and that is more of a journey-centric goal?
Yeah, so I think two big takeaways
that I'm getting from this is, number one,
nobody likes to be told, hey, you're doing your job wrong.
We're going to have to change it completely.
Everything you did before wasn't as good as it could be.
That's a very real challenge.
And addressing the organizational culture
around the work that people do and how personal
does somebody take it when a criticism
or a constructive piece of feedback
is given for somebody's work.
Because the people aspect of it is a very huge part
of why journey management can be difficult.
Not to mention the roles and responsibilities.
I'm sure that there's already a lot of just discourse
about the term product and UX.
Should they even be the same thing?
There are so many different terms
that can itself confuse the process of design,
let alone designing with multiple journeys.
So it definitely seems like understanding the culture
and who currently reports to whom
and just getting a good sense of how do people feel
about their work and get that under control first.
And then the second thing seemed to be
starting small as well.
But yeah, Kim, did you have something about that?
I was just going to add to that, Therese.
I think that what you just said is understanding the culture
and how people are doing their work.
That's something that can really be done
with what Joachim was talking about,
was understanding how we're delivering our journey now
was one of the things that he says
is really important to do first.
Not only let's map our journey experience for the user,
but let's understand how we operate
to deliver that experience currently.
So part of that exploration and research can be
to understand what are people's different roles
along this way, how are they feeling about it,
and start to prepare yourself
to deliver a little bit of change and roll out change
to those groups by understanding how they are
impacting the journey as it is now.
And we can also look a bit into the future
of what might happen.
I mean, journey management,
if we're looking at the coming decade
where this is going to be more of the norm
rather than a new practice,
you can look at companies like Zendesk.
When they launched, nobody had customer support
or support management or something even vaguely named
like that into their companies.
And then four years down the road,
I wouldn't say that it was only Zendesk who did it,
it was like a whole community of people coming together.
There's an org chart, there's a structure,
there's management layers in place, there's reporting,
there's roles like literally defined around that.
Same for product management.
I mean, how long does that exist?
10, 20, 30 years, maybe tops?
We now have a whole set of rituals and roles around that
and we actually trying to find out what it means.
And I think we're at the same stage for journey management,
but just a little bit earlier in the life cycle
of journey management, figuring it out,
but maybe we can check it out in five or 10 years
from now listening back, there will be an org chart.
There's maybe even a chief journey officer in your board
and there's journey managers, journey directors,
there is VP of customer journey,
there's all these different roles in the company
that put the emphasis on like this cross-functional horizon
in our workflow in the business.
So where we are today is not where we are going to be
in two, three, five, maybe 10 years from now.
Yeah, so related to that,
where we're going to be in the future,
obviously there are some folks who already are
doing journey management pretty well.
So I was wondering if you could share a little bit
about what doing this well looks like.
Like I realized we have that new tool, they do,
which is obviously helping teams to figure this out.
So I'm wondering if you could describe,
what are some of those capabilities?
What are some of those skills or activities
that people might be doing
in these more high-performing organizations?
High-performing organization is also good to note.
Like sometimes, especially when it starts
from a design angle, like in UX design or product design
or service design, there are enough people
that understand what journey management
or customer journeys actually mean and how to use them,
how to use blueprints and how to actually navigate
this complexity in the organization,
bringing in the customer experience.
So that is one thing.
And then there's the maturity
of the rest of the organization to use it,
to work with it, to be part of it,
and to actually create a culture around this.
So those two levels of maturity
should not be too far away from each other.
And otherwise you need to invest
in making it closer together, both obviously going up.
But if that is the case,
we are learning from these customers as well.
There's like fantastic examples
where you see companies like Atlassian,
they are a product company by nature,
a B2B SaaS company by nature,
making big investments in running on customer journeys
where all their teams across different products
and portfolios are starting to collaborate
from the customer's perspective using journeys.
And as a big company,
they have tens of thousands of people working there
and therefore also a lot of journeys to manage,
but they did really, really well in the early days
to say, okay, we understand there is a big journey framework
that all these journeys will be part of.
So getting a first stab at that was what they did.
But then they said, okay,
but we are going to invest in a few key journeys
and a few key steps to get it up and run.
Not like bring all the 180 designers of the company together
and start doing this,
but like let's start small with the small pockets
of journeys, then consolidate,
then bring it to the next step.
And on the other hand,
we have an amazing insurance company in Canada
who is a little bit smaller in size
and they had done a CX transformation,
customer experience transformation of sorts.
So philosophically or in more of a high level,
they were ready as a company
and they just needed tools to unlock it.
So they started from, or with the end of mind,
with all journeys in place
and just needed a management tool to support their work.
So those are like two sides of the approaches
that we've seen.
And maybe another one that I really like
is the Dutch postal service.
Royal mail or equivalent of the US mail.
And they are breaking down as we speak,
their NPS measurements,
all the way into four levels of customer journeys
that they can actually measure, plan and organize around.
So big work that they're doing,
but they are making huge leaps doing this together
across different teams.
Yeah, I would just, to just put a bow on everything
that Joachim explained,
I like how you mentioned some teams,
some organizations are starting small,
maybe just focusing on a few things
and doing things more in a grassroots way.
Whereas some organizations have the buy-in
and the vision to do a larger transformation
and try to seek big change sooner.
Every organization is different.
I think what ties them all together
in terms of showing success and maturing in this
is a mindset of journey centered focus and also agility.
Being open to be nimble as an organization
and make adjustments and not feel like you're stuck
in your old ways of operating,
but just being open-minded to make some small adjustments
or big adjustments to meet the landscape where it's going
and to be going along with the way we see experience design
and the way consumers are experiencing
our products and service and go with that
rather than fighting that momentum.
Yeah, and this I think is actually a really good point
to transition into what I think
is a good takeaways question for our group here.
But obviously many teams might already be doing this,
but many teams, probably more teams
are less likely to be doing this right now.
And so they might be hearing this podcast thinking,
yes, I see the value of doing this.
How the heck am I gonna get started?
Where do I even begin?
Yeah, so my course, Customer Journey Management,
we speak to this specific problem.
The audience for that is people who work in product
and UX who understand that this is important,
they see the value, but they understand this is a process
that's gonna happen where we have to scale our ability
and start to implement capabilities to do this.
So how do we get started?
A lot of it kind of just sums up
what we've been talking about today.
I always say, if you don't have your key journeys defined,
understood, and mapped,
that's really where you have to start
because those maps, the visualizations are a great tool
to go around and communicate and have important conversations
with leaders and decision makers
that you really need to understand the business value
and to help you make the decisions that are necessary
to create movement and adopt some of the ways
that you need to work and collaborate to actually execute.
So starting with understanding
and mapping and documenting those.
And then at the same time in parallel,
figuring out who your allies are,
starting to build relationships,
establishing dialogue with people
on other functional groups, leadership roles,
who you know are gonna be part of that collaborative network
of people that you'll be working with
as you start to design things across journeys
and starting to kind of build the culture.
Yeah, actually, it's funny,
I started smiling as you were saying all the networking
and discussing with the people who are gonna be your allies.
I remember when I was new to UX,
I never really realized how political of a activity
or an endeavor some of our work can be,
especially since a lot of our work does involve
not just making things look aesthetically pleasing,
but actually deeply understanding our customers.
And as a result, that knowledge impacts
more than just color palettes.
It impacts design decisions.
It impacts business decisions and business strategy.
So it does end up being a very political
in nature responsibility at times
to start building those allies.
Now, Yochum, I would love to hear your thoughts as well.
As co-founder of TheyDo,
what can you say about what TheyDo offers
as far as different capabilities
and what advice could you give to teams
looking to get started?
So in the future, I believe that the best companies
just work journey centric.
But to get there, there is a now
and there is a way of working once you're set up, right?
What Kim speaks to is true.
You need to get started
with understanding these key journeys.
But once you realize how you can start making impact,
you're looking beyond understanding
a few of these key journeys and you wanna start managing.
So basically journey management with TheyDo
enables teams to improve the customer experience,
working as one while being part of many different teams
in many different time zones
or many different locations at the same time,
where we help to create alignment,
make those business decisions.
And what TheyDo does really well
is beyond let's say journey framework,
stacking up all the journeys
and making sure that people can understand them,
access them, continuously research,
capture their findings, their data,
and really make those journeys come to life.
We also offer a workflow from insights implementation,
say like, how are the opportunities from this journey
stacking up to all the opportunities
that we see in a particular area of business
or a particular focus that we have as a company
or the way we use it internally.
So like we have OCRs, objective key results,
and then how do the opportunities in the journeys
actually inform these objectives that we have?
So making that instant customer
and business alignment possible
is what we basically get out of that for every day.
And we just help shape the tools
of the future of journey management for tomorrow.
And I think we're just getting started.
Absolutely.
I think, yeah,
giving the disembodied monster of journey management,
a body, giving it a form,
I think can make it really a lot easier to talk about.
And I also think like not only is it easier to talk about,
but I think it gives everyone something to point to.
And it probably does help with that culture aspect.
It probably does help in the sense
that we're no longer pointing at each other as like,
oh, you're responsible for this one specific task
and therefore this whole journey lies
on your shoulders, right?
Those kinds of less subjective conversations
are less likely because you have something objective
that you can point to.
So it sounds like journey management
is gonna be growing in maturity as a whole
and I'm really excited to hear about the work
that you all are doing.
So to wrap up, if anyone wants to follow your work,
where could you point people to?
We'll start with Joakim.
Well, dado.com, that's the easiest place to get started.
If you are really serious about setting this up
for your company and believe that this is the next thing,
you can also DM me on LinkedIn, ask me anything you want.
I mean, we are quite busy building this out,
but if you're serious about this,
I would love to hear from you,
learn from you and see how you're doing.
Absolutely.
And Kim, for those who want to read more about your work,
I know you're often putting out articles.
Where could you point people to?
I would just say subscribe to the nngroup.com newsletter.
That's where everything new that we publish goes out first.
So if you're watching the newsletter,
you're gonna see any new research that I'm putting out,
which by the way,
I'm in the middle of a pretty in-depth study
where I'm actually just observing and watching teams
and how they're trying to solve this problem.
So I'm gonna be writing about that,
putting out some case studies
and trying to pull together some trends and themes
from that research that's gonna be coming out
in the next few months.
All right, sounds good.
We'll include all those links in the show notes,
but I just wanted to say,
I'm really grateful that you are both here
speaking with me today.
I enjoyed this conversation a lot
and I think the audience is going to get a lot out of this
as they look forward to a new era
of user experience design.
So thank you, Joachim.
Thank you, Kim.
It's been a pleasure.
Thanks, Therese.
It's so nice to be here.
Thank you so much, Therese.
That was Kim Salazar and Joachim van der Veer.
If you want to learn more about them and their work,
you can check the episode notes
for links to some of the courses, articles, and websites
so that you can get started on journey management.
But don't forget, we also have thousands of articles,
videos, and reports on our website, www.nngroup.com.
And if you enjoy this show in particular,
of course, please subscribe
or follow on the podcast platform of your choice.
This episode was hosted by me, Therese Fessenden,
and produced by Tim Neussesser.
We are thrilled to have Tim on our growing production team.
All editing and post-production is by Jonas Zellner.
Music is by Tiny Music and Dresden the Flamingo.
That's it for today's show.
Until next time, remember, keep it simple.