Case Study · N° 01 Unite · 2023 — ongoing Reading time · 9 min

§ Case Study · Journey Management · In progress

Building a shared
Journey Management
practice.

Turning scattered customer insights into a journey that teams can understand, use, and improve together.


Client
Unite
Status
Ongoing
My Role
UX designer · practice lead
Tool
CXomni
Timeline
2023 — ongoing
Disciplines
UX · PX · Product · CX · Tech · Data
§ 01 — Why it matters

Everyone owns a piece of the journey. Nobody owns the whole.

Product teams optimise their own screens. Research sits in reports. CX tracks satisfaction. Tech logs errors. Each view is accurate, and none of them shows what the customer actually experiences from end to end.

Journey Management closes that gap — not by producing a better diagram, but by giving every discipline one shared view of the customer experience that they contribute to and make decisions against. That only works if the journey is maintained, connected to real evidence, and used in the places where scope gets decided.

§ 02 — The starting point

A tool, and no practice around it.

When I picked the work up, two things were already in place: CXomni had been selected as the Journey Management tool, and initial stakeholder conversations had happened. What didn't exist was everything that makes a tool useful.

So the work was never really "create a journey map." It was to establish a practical way for UX, PX, Product, CX, Tech, and Data to work from the same end-to-end view.

§ 03 — The challenge

A map gets admired. A practice gets used.

The predictable failure mode for journey work is a beautiful artefact that nobody updates. Six months later it describes a product that no longer exists, and teams quietly go back to their own views.

Avoiding that meant treating the journey as infrastructure rather than a deliverable: it needs a structure people can add to without asking permission, evidence attached to the right place, and a reason for teams to open it during planning rather than after.

§ 04 — The first journey

Starting with the buyer who uses the platform most.

Rather than mapping the whole organisation at once, we started with one journey that mattered and could be built properly: the operative purchaser — the same persona at the centre of the marketplace redesign — moving through her core purchasing path.

01Homepage
02Search
03Product page
04Basket
05Checkout

Fig. 01 — The Operative Purchaser Journey. Five stages, and the backbone of everything that follows.

Five stages is deliberately modest. It's narrow enough to complete to a real standard, and recognisable enough that every team can find their own work inside it.

§ 05 — Anatomy of a stage

What sits inside one stage.

The structure is what makes a journey usable by more than one discipline. Each stage holds eight layers, so a researcher, a PM, and an engineer can all open the same stage and find the thing they came for.

Goals & needs

What the buyer is trying to achieve at this point, in her terms.

Actions & touchpoints

What she actually does, and where — screen, email, phone, offline.

Pain points

Where the experience breaks down, blocks, or slows her.

Research insights

Evidence from interviews, usability tests, and feedback — attached to the stage it belongs to.

UX & CX opportunities

What could be improved, framed as an opportunity rather than a solution.

Technical issues

Known constraints, errors, and dependencies affecting this stage.

Jira tickets

The delivery work already connected to this part of the journey.

KPIs

The measures that tell us whether this stage is getting better or worse.

Fig. 02 — Eight information layers per stage. Structure defined · being populated

CXomni · one stage expanded, showing the layers in the tool

Fig. 03 — The same structure as it appears in CXomni. Screenshot to be added.

§ 06 — Connecting insights

From findings in a deck to evidence in context.

Most organisations don't lack research. They lack a way to find it again. A finding lives in the presentation where it was first reported, and the person who needs it eighteen months later doesn't know it exists.

Before
  • Insights live in individual reports and presentations
  • Findings are organised by study, not by customer experience
  • Retrieval depends on remembering who ran what, and when
  • The same problem gets rediscovered by different teams
Towards
  • Insights attached to the journey stage they concern
  • Organised by customer experience, not by project
  • Findable by anyone looking at that part of the journey
  • Evidence accumulates instead of expiring

Fig. 04 — The shift in how insights are stored and found. In progress

Example · a research insight linked to a journey stage

Fig. 05 — A worked example, to be added.

§ 07 — Tool vs practice

CXomni is the tool. The practice is the harder part.

CXomni does real work: it holds the journey structure, connects insights, opportunities, KPIs, and Jira tickets to stages, and makes the whole thing visible to everyone at once. That's the enabling layer.

But a tool doesn't decide who maintains a stage, what qualifies as an insight worth adding, or when the journey gets reviewed. Those are the parts that determine whether anyone still uses it next year.

Common structure

One agreed anatomy, so every stage is built the same way.

Clear ownership

A named owner per journey and per stage, accountable for currency.

Contribution rules

What gets added, by whom, at what level of evidence.

Regular reviews

A recurring rhythm for updating, not an annual clean-up.

Link to delivery

Opportunities connect to Jira, so the journey touches real work.

Shared literacy

Enough common understanding that teams read the journey the same way.

Fig. 06 — The six conditions a journey practice needs around the tool.

§ 08 — Ways of working

Six disciplines, one view.

The point of a shared journey is that each discipline contributes what only it can see, and reads what the others contribute. UX and PX bring qualitative evidence and opportunities; Product brings scope and priority; CX brings satisfaction signals; Tech brings constraints and error reality; Data brings the KPIs that show movement.

Getting there is largely a stakeholder task rather than a design task — showing each group what the journey gives back to them before asking them to maintain a part of it.

Stakeholder input · workshop or contribution model

Fig. 07 — How the disciplines contribute. Visual to be added.

§ 09 — My contribution

What I did.

This is a practice being built rather than a project being delivered, so my contribution is a mix of structural design, research integration, and internal advocacy.

§ 10 — Where it stands

Current progress and next steps.

The practice is partly established and still being built. Rather than claim an outcome, here is what is actually true today.

Done

First journey set up in CXomni. Structure and information layers defined. Existing research and user needs brought in. Initial stakeholders involved across disciplines.

In progress

Populating stages to a consistent standard. Connecting insights, opportunities, KPIs, and Jira tickets. Establishing ownership per stage and a review rhythm.

Planned

Extending beyond the operative purchaser to further journeys. Embedding the journey in planning and prioritisation. Contribution rules and shared literacy across teams.

To be added

Evidence of adoption once available — journey views, stakeholder feedback, and examples of decisions the journey actually informed.

§ 11 — Key learning

The map was never the point.

Journey Management becomes valuable when it moves from being a visual map to becoming a shared decision-making tool.

Everything difficult about this project has been organisational rather than visual: agreeing a structure, finding owners, making contribution cheap enough to happen, and giving teams a reason to look. The diagram was the easy part — which is the same lesson the marketplace redesign taught, in a different register.


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N° 03 — A 25-year-old marketplace.

Rebuilding the same buyer's core journeys at Unite.