With knowledge of this key tool for driving customer experience across channels accelerating throughout the past year, you can expect customer journey mapping to be among the biggest digital marketing buzzwords of 2016.

As Chris Risdon at CapitalOneLabs said in 2011: “their importance exceeds their prevalence.” That’s finally starting to change.

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

In a sentence, customer journey mapping is the process of defining a comprehensive and actionable step-by-step path of your customer’s complete journey in addressing a problem or need they have identified.

From awareness of the product to customer retention, including sales touch points, engagements with your product or service, and any other customer interactions which fall in between, customer journey maps help to give a better understanding of customer motivations, goals, and behaviors.

From Joel Flom’s UX Matters article comes this example of someone looking for broadband service in 2010 (click to view full size):

Why Should I use Customer Journey Maps?

Whether you are launching a new digital product or updating an existing site, app, or other digital property, Customer journey maps provide valuable insight, informing: strategy, design, and content.

Customer journey maps help to better define the who, what, why, when, where, and how of customer decision-making by taking an in-depth look at customer personas, timelines, emotions, touchpoints, and channels, throughout the customer journey.

Well-considered customer journey maps enable you to:

1. determine the ideal channels to reach customers at different points of their journey;
2. work with sales, marketing, and support to identify the content necessary to drive users to action across those channels;
3. focus each of your digital properties around the role they fulfill within the customer journey.

This example highlights the key media required across various touchpoints in a sales funnel (click to view full size):

Ultimately, your customer journey map is the key tool you’ll use to increase conversions and improve customer retention.

So why should you use customer journey maps? Because they inform successful and profitable digital properties.

Get Mapping

Do you need help creating your customer journey map and understanding how your digital properties can be better aligned to your customer’s journey?

Get in touch.

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Whether you’re working on an existing product or bringing a new idea to market, start the year off right by focusing your efforts on making sure you’re delivering the right product to your most passionate and valuable consumers.

The free Say Yeah Product Questionnaire hits on several key touch points of delivering a product to market which serves business goals while at the same time meeting user needs.

With this document you’ll consider:

1. What motivates you to deliver a great product.
2. Who your product users are.
3. The market you’re playing in.
4. The product that can best serve that market.
5. The business goals that need to be met to ensure your success.
6. The personality your product and team expresses to engage your target.
7. What you’ve done to validate all of the above points.

With a review of those points, you’ll be able to identify areas of strength and where further work needs to be done to ensure you’re focusing your resources and your product appropriately.

This holiday season is a great time to begin working through our free Product Questionnaire as a refresher for your team and to help ensure you’re on track in the new year.

Get the Product Questionnaire

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We’re opening up our doors for Startup Open House this coming Oct 30th from 4 – 7 pm.

This is a chance to visit dozens of startups across Toronto, along with those of us in the west end, including Say Yeah!, Indiegogo, Freshbooks, Stylekick, Gelaskins, and a half dozen more in Liberty Village.

It’s also Lee’s birthday so it will be a double-celebration.

Come by and talk product design, MVPs, or just to high-five Lee!

Sign up for Startup Open House

And please RSVP if you’re coming to see us so we know how much cake and ice cream (or other munchies) to have on hand.

RSVP to visit Say Yeah

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Don’t create features, solve problems.

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“Startups live on growth. It’s the indicator of a great product.”

Sam Altman recently kicked off Stanford’s How To Start a Startup course. The course is running now through December, leveraging all the experience Sam and related founders and advisors (including Dustin Moskovitz, Marissa Mayer, Peter Thiel, and more) have been building over the past 9 years at Y Combinator.

Y Combinator’s four areas you need to excel at in order to maximize your chance of success as a startup:

1. Idea
2. Product
3. Team
4. Execution

With a massive dose of luck.

So much great market insight from Sam:

For startups, you want an idea that turns into a monopoly. But you can’t be a monopoly in a big market right away. Too much competition for that. You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly. And then quickly expand.

It’s good if you can say something like: today, only this small subset of users are going to use my product, but I’m going to get all of them. And in the future almost everyone is going to use my product.

Dig in and enjoy this fantastic lecture series

And here’s Say Yeah’s contact page for when you’re ready to execute on that great idea.

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Strategy is important because the resources available to achieve your goals are limited. ~ Fred Wilson

Just a couple of weeks ago Tara Hunt shared her insights on how to maintain product focus in her Buyosphere post-mortem. In an equally brave post this past week, Rand Fishkin has shared his challenges, both personal and professional, while running Moz.

One of the key insights from Rand’s post relates to product focus.

For Moz, providing a feature-rich subscription service while embarking on a massive new software project meant resources needed to be pulled from existing products in order to meet slipping deadlines on the new software project. This led to disastrous results.

Rand says:

Without attention from our team, some of (our) products came to be eclipsed by competitors who focused exclusively on one particular piece of the products in our subscription.

Limited resources, from marketing, to product planning and design, to engineering and support, mean any new endeavour you take on, whether it’s serving a new market or extending your product with new features, can hamper core product and market efforts.

Rand continues:

It was heartbreaking to hear over and over again how one of my SEO friends had stopped using some particular Moz tool because they’d found tool X instead to take its place.

Had we been listening to our customers, iterating on the projects and products that mattered to them, and not consuming all of our development time and energy on long-delayed, poorly launched megasuite that did lots of things they didn’t need, we’d have been in a much different place.

Moz is back on track now because they’ve shifted resources to maintain focus on their core product offerings, including getting back to serving the needs of their current users. This is no small effort and it’s a reminder to ensure customer retention is given top priority, especially when resources are limited.

To be sure, if you’re not focused on the market you’re already serving well—ensuring you’re delivering value to them on an ongoing basis—you’ll quickly find yourself losing market share.

And avoiding customer churn is absolutely the number one reason to maintain product focus.

Product strategy as a foundational skill

If you’re looking to bring fundamental product strategy methodologies and execution to your team, we’re here to help.

Get in touch

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The goal of this service is to help entrepreneurs and product owners identify and address issues which may be preventing product use and engagement.

We ran a 3 minute survey with a series of questions that would help us identify how we may provide the most value to you and your product teams.

From the results of this survey, we’ve launched our product insights questionnaires to help you understand and take next steps with your product work.

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Customers want to be guided to the simplest, easiest resolution possible.

That’s Matt Dixon talking about customer service, but this adage holds true for any interface.

The more complex your product, the more choices that need to be made, the more difficult you make it for people to engage with you and your product.

Reduce complexity and guide your users wherever and whenever you can across all touchpoints.

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Tara Hunt recently shared a post-mortem on her product baby, Buyosphere. (Sorry, Tara, we know that feeling well.)

There’s a lot of wisdom that comes from experience. She has it on the client side and as a founder. And no matter how much we know these things, as a founder you can often find yourself taking shortcuts or thinking too broadly to be effective.

Here are Tara’s great tips for remaining focused:

1. Don’t get distracted raising money if you don’t absolutely need it.
2. Focus on one market.
3. Immerse yourself in that market, learn everything about them, and how you can best serve them with your product.
4. Build your product in public,

Our advice: listen to Tara.

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