Journey Management is Organisational Literacy
How to move beyond artifacts and build shared direction across silos.
A few weeks ago, I opened a brand new Slack workspace for the Design Mavericks community — a space for those of us who want to go deeper, challenge norms, and push the conversation forward in design, strategy, and organisational change.
Unsurprisingly, one of the very first channels that emerged was #journeymanagement — and it’s quickly become one of the liveliest. Members have been incredibly generous: sharing contexts, lessons learned, and practices they’re evolving inside their teams. They’re also asking honest, vulnerable questions about what’s hard — and offering each other practical, grounded support.
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One question that sparked a rich discussion came from a member navigating a familiar dynamic:
“Our teams are very feature-delivery oriented. It’s easier for me to get them to use journeys when needed versus getting them to continuously step back and manage them. How do others keep journeys alive and relevant over time?”
This speaks to a deeper tension I see inside many organisations today: the gap between execution cadence and strategic continuity.
Designers often find themselves pulled into the velocity of sprint cycles, with little space to maintain a coherent, long-view understanding of how customer and business outcomes evolve over time. The journey, which starts as a useful anchor, risks becoming a dusty artefact.
So what does it really mean to “manage” a journey, and why is this not just extra design overhead?
Managing isn’t about maintenance — it’s about meaning
The asker defined journey management as:
“Researching, understanding, and prioritizing opportunities and ideas continuously over time to guide planning, anchored in outcomes.”
Exactly. And I’d add this:
Managing a journey is less about keeping a map up to date, and more about holding space for shared learning and direction over time.
Holding space. It's not about owning every insight or decision. It’s about creating a consistent, visible locus of coordination. A place in the organisation where multiple perspectives can plug in, pattern recognition can emerge, and choices can be made with greater context.
This idea came into focus thanks to a powerful example shared in our Slack community by Mandy Giacchetto, one of our newly appointed Design Mavericks Ambassadors and host of the #journeymanagement channel. She described how her team reframed their Consumer Loan Journey in terms of two business-critical outcomes — related to cost savings and revenue — and used those as the gravitational pull for cross-functional alignment.
By rooting the journey in shared outcomes, they moved it from an artifact to an organisational focal point — one that allowed silos like digital banking, the contact center, and lending operations to orient around the same signal. That’s exactly the kind of connective work that journey management enables when it’s done right — and not left to design alone.
From “journey maps” to journey-based operating models
In my earlier post, How to Organise Your Journeys for Effective Decision Making, I explored the idea of anchoring journeys not as documentation, but as durable units of strategic orientation — tied to outcomes, funded with intent, and stewarded across functions.
Building on that, what we’re really talking about here is a journey as an organisational sense-making system.
Instead of a static diagram:
It holds a throughline between what people experience and what the business values.
It absorbs signals from across the organisation — product, support, ops, marketing, compliance — and reflects them back in a way that allows for coherence and action.
It’s not one person’s job to update it — but it is someone’s role to hold the space where meaning gets created, maintained, and shared.
Where Design Ops comes in: scaling stewardship, not just systems
In organisations that have a Design Ops function, this is where their role becomes incredibly powerful.
Design Ops can help move journey stewardship from hero work to scalable capability.
Not by owning the journeys outright, but by enabling the infrastructure and rituals that keep them healthy over time. That includes:
Establishing journey frameworks to ensure consistency across artefacts and touchpoints.
Creating lightweight governance structures, such as steward roles, shared outcomes, and rhythms for updates and sense-making.
Integrating journey signals — such as customer feedback, operational data, and performance metrics — into a shared feedback loop.
Supporting cross-functional alignment by bridging language and planning cycles across Design, Product, Ops, and Business.
Fostering a community of practice, where journey stewards can share tensions, insights, and approaches that work.
Design Ops, in this context, isn’t just managing the tools of journey work — it’s stewarding the conditions for journey work to become repeatable, resilient, and truly embedded across the organisation.
When Design Ops supports journey stewardship, it becomes possible to hold space for journeys at scale, without sacrificing depth.
Try this: micro-stewardship with macro payoff
Here’s a lightweight but powerful practice I’ve seen work inside teams where attention is dominated by feature delivery:
Select one active journey focus area (e.g. “Becoming a client” or “Loan Repayment”).
Define 2 clear business outcomes related to this journey — ideally relevant to two different departments (e.g. Self-Service Rate from Ops and Share of Wallet from Product).
Appoint two stewards: one from Design or CX, and one from another core discipline (Product, Ops, Service). Their job is not to “own” the journey — their job is to hold the space for sense-making, month over month.
Establish a recurring signal check-in:
What’s changed in the experience?
What voice of customer or performance data is surfacing?
What’s coming up next that might affect this journey?
What are we ignoring or deferring?
Plug that back into your planning — not as an FYI, but as one of the lenses informing prioritisation. Make the journey not a reference but a rhythm.
Journey as connective tissue
Treat the journey as the connective tissue for outcomes people already care about.
People already care about outcomes — but often from inside their silos. Product focuses on growth metrics. Ops is driven by efficiency. Risk looks at compliance. Service is laser-focused on contact rates.
The journey doesn’t compete with those priorities — it connects them. It shows how fragmented initiatives converge (or clash) in the customer’s lived experience. It reveals where good intentions get lost in translation — and where more aligned effort could unlock shared value.
When we treat journeys this way, we’re not asking people to adopt entirely new goals. We’re inviting them to see their own goals more clearly, in the context of the broader system they operate in.
Journeys Are the Memory of Your Organisation
If your team is execution-heavy, don’t try to force them to “manage” journeys as an extra thing. Instead, treat the journey as the connective tissue for outcomes they already care about.
Managing journeys isn’t a design thing. It’s an organisational literacy thing.
When you manage a journey well, you’re not managing a map. You’re managing shared attention. You’re keeping your organisation oriented to what matters, through the lens of the customer.
And that’s not overhead. That’s leadership.
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I needed this! We get lost in discussions about ownership but the term steward resonates with me and works very well for us at the moment.