How to Use Journey Mapping to Improve our Agile Process?

“Journey mapping helps us empathize with our customers and understand their needs." - Donna Lichaw

In project management and software development, Agile is a flexible and iterative approach that prioritizes collaboration, customer satisfaction, and adapting to change. It involves delivering small, working increments of a product, regularly reassessing and adjusting based on customer feedback, and encouraging active participation from all team members. The aim of agile methodology is to deliver better results and value for customers by promoting a culture of continuous improvement.

Journey mapping in Agile is a visual representation of the customer experience, including all of the interactions and touchpoints they have with a product or service. It helps teams to understand the customer's perspective, identify areas for improvement, and prioritize changes to the customer journey.

For organizations, looking to improve their Agile process Journey Mapping is a valuable tool for them. By visualizing the customer experience, journey mapping can help teams to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and pain points faced by their customers. This information can then be used to create a roadmap for implementation, ensuring that teams can work in a more focused and efficient way.

Journey Mapping and Implementation plan as a roadmap is a powerful combination for improving the customer experience and leading to business success. Journey Mapping involves creating a visual representation of the customer experience, including all of the interactions and touchpoints they have with a product or service. This helps teams to gain a deep understanding of the customer perspective and identify areas for improvement. The implementation plan serves as a roadmap, outlining the steps that need to be taken to make improvements and achieve the desired customer outcomes. With journey mapping and an implementation plan, teams can create a focused, actionable plan for improving the customer experience and upgrading business results. The Journey Mapping process helps to create a plan after ensuring that all necessary steps are included, and proper importance should be given to what leads to an effective outcome.

Both Journey mapping and the Agile customer journey together play an important role in improving customer experiences and driving business success. By combining journey mapping and an implementation plan, teams can create a focused and actionable plan for improving the customer experience and delivering better results. Journey mapping can be used to improve our Agile process and it's essential for delivering excellent customer experiences.

What is Journey Mapping in Agile?

Journey mapping is a visual representation of the customer experience, including all of the interactions and touchpoints they have with a product or service. The important goal of Journey Mapping is to know a deep understanding of the customer's perspective and identifies the areas needed for improvement. It can be a valuable tool for Agile teams as it enables them to better understand the customer experience and build a roadmap for improvement that should be focused on delivering the best possible customer outcomes.

The Journey Mapping process typically involves defining customer personas, identifying touchpoints, creating a visual representation of the journey, and involving all members of the team in the improvement process. Journey mapping provides teams with a comprehensive view of the customer experience, including both the customer's needs and their pain points, which can be used to inform the development of an implementation plan.

Why is Journey Mapping Important for Agile Teams?

Journey mapping helps teams to better understand the customer experience and create a roadmap for improvement that is essential for them. After understanding the customer experience, Agile teams can identify areas for improvement and can prioritize changes to the customer journey that will have the greatest impact. In order to align a common goal, which is essential for delivering excellent customer experience, Journey mapping helps teams to gain a shared understanding of the customer experience.

Journey mapping is also important for Agile teams because it provides a comprehensive view of the customer experience, including both the customer's needs and their pain points. This can help teams in identifying the root cause of customer pain points and helps to create solutions that address the underlying problem, rather than just treating the symptoms. By resolving the root cause of customer pain points, teams can deliver more meaningful and sustainable improvements to the customer experience.

How to Use Journey Mapping to Improve Our Agile Process:

To use journey mapping to improve our Agile process, we need to follow these steps:

Define Customer Personas: Defining customer personas is the first step in the Journey Mapping process. Customer personas are basically fictional characters that represent a business’s target audience for a product or service. By defining customer personas, teams can be able to understand the customer's needs, motivations, and pain points.

Identify Touchpoints: After defining customer personas the next step is to identify touchpoints, which are all of the interactions and touchpoints that a customer has with a product or service. Touchpoints can include things like calls to customer service, visits to a website, or interactions with a mobile app.

Create a Visual Representation of the Journey: Once the touchpoints have been identified, the next step is to create a visual representation of the customer journey. Journey mapping can be done using a variety of tools, including mind maps, flowcharts, or customer journey maps. The visual representation of the journey should be used to illustrate the customer's experience, including their needs, motivations, and pain points.

Involve the Team in the Improvement Process: After the above-mentioned steps, finally, it's essential to involve the entire team in the improvement process. Journey mapping should be a team effort that involves all members of the team, including Product Owners, designers, developers, and stakeholders. By involving the team in the improvement process, teams can gain a shared understanding of the customer experience and align around a common goal.

Example of a journey map.

Need: Passenger wants to travel from one city to another in a short amount of time.

First Step: Customer goes to google and searches for the flight from the origin to destination.

Last Step: Passenger reaches the destination.

Then we identify all the other touchpoints or steps in between. Like passengers books the flight, goes to the airport, Check-in and baggage, Security, Lounge , Gate Control, Inflight, Immigration, Baggage Claim and move out of airport.

Once we identify all these steps then we do surveys and identify at each stage how is customer experience. What are they feeling happy about? Are there any natural emotions? What are the challenges they are facing and they are very unhappy about? What do they wish to make their experience better?

We should do similar experience survey and record the same for the employees who are providing service using the systems to the passengers.

This gives us opportunities to improve and Epic, Feature or Story ideas for agile product development. These ides or initiatives are further refined and prioritized using WSJF or other techniques and then refined.

Its great to learn how to facilitate Journey Maps workshops and how to get the right benefits from the same as it helps in identifying the desirability of the solution. Further we can check the feasibility, viability, and sustainability as we refine the idea.

As per scaled agile framework (SAFe) customer journey map captures step a customer goes through and experiences as they engages with an organizations Operational value stream. This allows teams to find ways to improve the solutions created by development value streams for end-to-end experience.