Journey Mapping—Aligning the Org

Designing a shared customer map to bridge internal siloes and align around shared purpose

Hero - Elements Webflow Library - BRIX Templates

Role

Service Designer, Researcher, Strategist

Tools

Figma, Zoom, Google Sheets

Year

2025 [10 weeks]

Client

Payroll, HR, and Benefits Platform Provider 

short on time? here's a quick...

Project Overview

Problem

Without a unified customer journey view, our client's siloed teams set misaligned priorities, resulting in fractured user experiences, missed revenue, and churn—highlighting the need for a holistic tool to guide strategic planning and cross-functional alignment.

Processes

Conducted 33+ interviews, incorporated voices from 21 teams, and facilitated 4 workshops to iterate, and iterate...and iterate an ever-evolving model.

Product

Built two E2E customer journey maps that now serve as a shared framework for 3,600 employees to prioritize customer needs, align teams, and visualize how work connects across the ecosystem.

Demo of interactive map layers that enable varying levels of info to be shown tailored to user needs. Blurred for privacy!
core processes in each phase...

Iterative 4 Step Approach

Extracting
artifacts

01

We treated documentation like a living reference: continuously requesting and reviewing everything from internal documentation to previous deliverables, to make sure each iteration of our map only became more grounded in truth.

Revising &
Reframing

02

With each new nugget of information, we revisited our model to pressure-test our hypotheses and refine it with fresh data.

Sometimes this meant adding milestones; other times, it required dismantling the entire structure to better represent the evolving reality.

Driving client
alignment

03

Each week, we held "micro-reviews" with our client’s main contact to share progress, gather feedback, and plan next steps. This created a constant stream of transparency, encouraged co-creation and client ownership, and provided guardrails for validating vision alignment at every step.

Co-writing with
Stakeholders

04

Our stakeholders were the authors, and we were the copywriters. To best capture their internal teams' experience, we leaned heavily into a constant loop of feedback and co-creation. We captured their stories and asked for both synchronous and asynchronous feedback on each hypotheses we had to ensure they felt accurately reflected in the map.

04
got a little more time?

Let's dive into the story:)

Phase 1

Defining Scope & Surfacing Assumptions

who exactly did our client serve?

Small & Medium Businesses

what was the critical problem our client had?

Customers Leaving from Disconnected Experience

Our client—a large payroll and HR platform serving small businesses—had no shared view of the full customer journey. The absence of a unified, customer-grounded truth left teams misaligned—and customers facing a fragmented experience, often ending in departure.

Phase 1: Scoping

Defining Scope & Guiding Questions

Working alongside our client, we defined the scope of the current state customer journey maps (CJMs):
  • Level 0 user journeys for 3 customer types
  • Product and non-product touchpoints
  • Key metrics
  • Pain points, teams, and channels
These scoping sessions inspired strategic questions that would guide the rest of the project. How might we...
Visualize the customer journey to center their voice and lived experience?
Help stakeholders see where and how their work connects to others in the journey?
Shift the organization from reactive to proactive measures to prevent churn?

Phase 1: Research

Engaging the Experts

After hypothesizing an initial model to use as stimulus, we conducted 30+ stakeholder interviews across 21+ teams—including engineering, design, marketing, and operations, to gather insights on:
  • Daily workflows and team responsibilities
  • Pain points and blockers
  • Success metrics and priorities
Facilitating a first round of stakeholder interview sessions

Phase 1: Brainstorming

Evolving the Map Structure

Our initial model mirrored how the client traditionally structured customer journeys—organized around internal product teams.

Synthesizing cross-functional interviews, we quickly realized this inside-out perspective failed to reflect the customer's true complex experience.
Initial linear journey used in stakeholder sessions
The emerging complexity of the customer journey couldn’t be captured through a linear lens. Instead, it demanded a model that reflected the cyclical nature of navigating the client’s interconnected products.
How could we reframe the structural lens of the map?

Centering Customer Purpose

Rather than chronology or internal team organization, I hypothesized organizing touchpoints by customer purpose and goal. This more accurately reflected how customers discover and manage multi-products with evolving business needs.
My first mockup of the "Manage and Activate" cycle, creating new buckets based on customer needs

Phase 2

Facilitating Workshops to Unify, Align, and Co-create

Phase 2: aligning

Workshop Facilitation

After incorporating our new hypothesis into the map, we began planning 4 workshops with objectives to:
1

Align Narrative

Are teams able to see where they play in the holistic customer experience?

2

Validate Content

Are overall touchpoints, customer steps, and team processes correct?

3

Surface Metrics

What are the most relevant/prominent KPIs at each point of the journey?

Post-workshop journey map filled with stakeholders' feedback!

Phase 2: uncovering

Workshop Reflections

Up until this point, we’d only spoken with stakeholders one-on-one. With the journey map as an aligning artifact, this marked the first time they came together to share space, ideas, and a common purpose.
Top: Stakeholders helping correct milestone content in the Map Validation Workshop. Bottom: Group shareout after ideating aspirational KPIs in the KPI Workshop.

Observation

I watched product leads speak confidently to their areas of ownership but more importantly, lean into their curiosity about unfamiliar functions.

Insight

The silos were more structural than cultural—the teams wanted to see how their work connected with others! They just needed the right tool to enable this.

Phase 3

Redefining, Finalizing, and Socializing

Phase 4: validation

Navigating Critical Concerns

Nearing the final deliverable date, we were left with a key concern in one of the last major client validation sessions:
The Employer/Employee map overlooked the deep interdependencies between Accountants and Employers
While we had intentionally created separate journey maps for each, this separation mirrored an internal silo we were now being asked to help challenge.
The 2 Employer/Employee and Accountant CJMs were complete, but there was a lack of understanding around their interdependencies

Phase 4: iteration

Bringing Balance

Focusing on the client's underlying concerns, I began comparing both high-level journeys and identifying where and how workflows overlapped, before abstracting it to a simple highlight.
Top: Drawing connections to where the 2 journeys had interdependencies
Bottom: Abstracted the connections on the Employer journey to highlight where the Accountants had a significant role.
I prototyped two ways to show my team how these could integrate within our existing map. Co-creating a final version that met client goals and preserved our core architecture, we were able to minimize disruptive changes and project delays.
Prototyped two ideas on the top to gather feedback from my team. Co-created the version at the bottom that was utilized in the final map.
The clients were thrilled this struck the right balance of bringing visibility to cross-journey relationships without overshadowing each map’s primary intent.

Phase 3: Exploration

Designing for Feedback, not Perfection

Finalizing the remaining swimlanes, I leaned into rapid prototyping as my main communication method. These conversations surfaced assumptions early and grounded strategic alignment in a tangible boundary object.
Top: Alternatives I quickly mocked up during an internal discussion to force rapid feedback. Bottom: Explored different plugins to showcase dynamic data and brought to the team to help drive the final design decision.
Most explorations never made it to the final map—but each one unlocked more productive conversations and a more confident step forward.

Personal growth

I learned to detach from early ideas and treat prototypes as learning tools. This helped address my hesitancy of sharing unfinished work and collect pivotal feedback.

Personal growth

Transforming ideas into sketches exposed assumptions, QUICKLY. I communicated through building and grounded design decisions in stakeholder input.

Final Map

Our final deliverable wasn’t a static artifact—it was a flexible system designed for a wide range of users to guide urgent action today and inform strategic planning tomorrow.
Not only did we provide our client with end-to-end user journeys and associated metrics to shift from reactive to proactive churn mitigation strategies, we also helped them embed their own internal service design team to align over 3,600 employees and champion systemic design thinking.