Peel back the layers of any digital transformation - the research, the design, the development - and you find maps. Customer journey maps, sitemaps, logic maps, empathy maps. It's one of the most-used cognitive tools we have, and for good reason: when you're building something with no physical form, a map is how you make sense of it.
Which raises a question that I think a lot of organisations are quietly failing to answer. You've got maps of every individual product. Who's holding the map of the whole thing?
Complex worlds need maps
The digital customer experience has both expanded and diversified, and it's done so faster than most organisations have restructured around it. It moved beyond a single website years ago. Journeys are complicated. Customer emotions matter more than they used to. And the number of ways a person can encounter your brand has multiplied to the point where cohesion is genuinely hard.
With every additional platform comes a threat to a coherent experience. The more surfaces you're on, the greater the chance the experience thins out somewhere and stops meeting the standard you set elsewhere.
Look at IKEA. It went from a largely bricks-and-mortar retailer to a business that has to hold its experience together across stores, ecommerce, apps, social - and, yes, the meatballs. Making that feel like one organisation is a serious undertaking.
Now, a business that size has dozens of teams working hard on the experience of the single product each of them owns. Those pods are brilliant for scaling. But they inherently fragment the experience. As Kerry Bodine put it, silos let us do things at scale that would otherwise be impossible - and they're terrible for the customer trying to actually get something done.
Your teams are each optimising their own bit of the journey. Nobody is optimising the journey.
So who owns the whole thing?
This is where I'd make the case for journey managers.
The role is simple in intent and genuinely difficult in practice. A journey manager sits above and across the product teams, and owns the customer's end-to-end experience rather than any individual product within it. Their job is to find the chasms that open up between teams - the handoffs, the seams, the moments where the customer falls between two owners - and to do something about them.
They do three things that nobody else in the structure is positioned to do.
They see the whole journey, and can therefore critique the parts of it that let the rest down. They hold the business objectives across platforms, which matters because individual teams inevitably shrink their success criteria down to metrics they can control - and in doing so, quietly lose the plot. And they plan across, rather than within, which means the sequence of improvements can be driven by customer impact rather than by whichever team shouted loudest at the planning session.
The parallel with outside-in
There's a real similarity here to the argument for outside-in transformation. A person who sits outside a product team's settled way of working is far more likely to put the customer genuinely at the centre - not because they're better people, but because they're not embedded in the constraints and compromises that the team has learned to live with.
That outsider position is the whole value of the role. Which also means it's the thing most at risk of being organised away. The moment a journey manager gets absorbed into a product team and given delivery targets, they've stopped being a journey manager and become another person with a backlog.
The honest challenge
I'd push back on one instinct that comes up whenever I raise this: we don't need a new role, our product owners already think about the customer. They do. But they think about the customer within their surface area, and they're incentivised to. Nobody in that structure is rewarded for improving an experience that happens in someone else's product. That's not a failure of people. It's a failure of who owns what.
And a note of realism: this only works if the role has the authority to change things. A journey manager with excellent maps and no influence is an expensive way of documenting your problems.
So the question for your leadership team. If a client had a rotten experience of you last week, and that experience spanned three teams - who would be accountable for fixing it? If the honest answer is "nobody, or all of them, which amounts to the same thing", you've found the gap.
Worth talking through? Book a short discovery call with the team at Distinction - no pitch, just an honest look at where your journey falls apart.
