Blog

How to Create a Powerful Customer Journey Map [+Webinar]

Blog Author: Ryan Cantwell

Table of Contents

Limited Access until Nov 18 – watch our on-demand webinar, Customer Journey Maps – Your Secret Weapon to Driving Product Adoption.

The customer journey is a phrase that’s received a lot of love in recent years, as the customer experience continues to be the key differentiator of a brand’s success. In fact, Adobe research revealed that experience-driven businesses have been shown to grow revenue 1.4X faster and increase customer lifetime value by 1.6X more than other companies.

The implication is clear: driving revenue from product introductions hinges on your ability to ensure a great customer experience at every touchpoint — and that requires mapping out and understanding the customer journey.

Understand Your Goals for Each Phase in the Journey

But creating a customer journey map isn’t always easy. You need to understand each phase and step a customer takes as they interact with your company, from researching a product to making a purchase, to using the product. To make things more complicated, if you have multiple target users, the journey may look different for each of them.

To get started, it’s critical to define the key goals for each phase of interaction, and what an ideal experience looks like. As you begin to map the customer journey, some key questions to explore include:

  • What are key touch points or interactions?
  • What is the purpose and level of importance of each touch point?
  • What are the customer’s thoughts and feelings at those points?
  • What are the goals at each touch point?
  • What is the potential length of the interaction?

Along with these questions, Product Managers can analyze the customer journey using other tools, such as the “Jobs-To-Be-Done” framework. This approach operates according to the assumption that customers “hire a product to get a job done.” Creating a Universal Job Map helps to deconstruct customers’ actions into specific steps and breaks down your customers’ issues into bite-sized chunks, so you can really get a feel for the customer’s experience at every step along their journey.

To bring it all together, everyone on your team should be on board and involved in helping to define the customer journey, to ensure nothing is left off the map. One or more customer journey creation sessions can be held to enable everyone to provide input.

Customer Journey Map Creation: Take a Deeper Dive

Limited Access until Nov 18 – watch the on-demand webinar, Customer Journey Maps – Your Secret Weapon to Driving Product Adoption. Todd Blaquiere, Principal Consultant and Trainer at 280 Group explores how to create a winning customer journey map, to understand customers, solve problems, influence decisions, and create customer value. He discusses how customer journey maps support the seamless alignment of the “Whole Product.”

About The Author

Ryan Cantwell

Ryan Cantwell helps B2B teams align strategy and execution. With energy, clarity, and storytelling, he makes product thinking contagious at Productside.
LinkedIn

Frequently Asked Questions

A customer journey map visually documents every interaction a customer has with your product, from initial awareness through ongoing usage. It helps Product Managers understand customer thoughts, emotions, and pain points at each stage, enabling teams to improve experience design, reduce friction, and drive stronger product adoption and customer lifetime value.
Product Managers create effective customer journey maps by defining customer personas, identifying key touchpoints, and clarifying goals at each stage of interaction. The process involves analyzing customer behaviors, emotions, and motivations, aligning teams around shared insights, and using structured frameworks to ensure the journey reflects real customer experiences.
The Jobs-to-Be-Done framework strengthens customer journey mapping by focusing on what customers are trying to accomplish, rather than specific features or solutions. By mapping jobs across each phase of the journey, Product Managers gain clearer insight into customer motivations, unmet needs, and opportunities to improve experience and product-market fit.
Customer journey maps improve product and business outcomes by revealing friction points that impact conversion, onboarding, and retention. When teams understand how customers experience each touchpoint, they can prioritize improvements that enhance satisfaction, accelerate adoption, and directly influence revenue growth and long-term customer loyalty.
Creating a customer journey map should be a cross-functional effort involving Product Management, Marketing, Sales, Customer Support, UX, and Engineering. Including multiple perspectives ensures the journey accurately reflects real customer experiences, uncovers hidden gaps, and aligns teams around delivering a cohesive, end-to-end customer experience.

You May Also Like