User journey maps are a UX staple. Almost all design projects start by creating a high level visualization of the steps a user must take within an experience. Moreover, a journey map is a great tool for communicating the overall UX vision with a large team.
I took this concept a step further and created a journey map specifically to structure a cross-team conversation about the focus of our roadmaps. I found that this fairly simple framework led to a productive discussion and clearly put our collective decisions in the context of the user experience.
First, I mapped out the high level experience into a series of user steps. Below is an example of the first four steps.
Next, I had each product manager and designer grade the quality of the experience at each step, leading to a discussion about why we chose our grades.
Following that, we aligned our company OKRs to the step in the experience that would be impacted.
Finally, each team walked through their roadmap for the next quarter in terms of the user journey and how it would be improved.
I created this journey map in Google Sheets, so that everyone could edit the document. You can find the template below!
