From Product Custodians to Strategic Leadership: 3 Stages of Journey Management Maturity

I recently collaborated with Greg Parrott from The X-mentor an article titled “Journey Management Maturity: Radically Reinventing Design’s Business Impact”, which originally published on his Substack on April 20th, 2025. this article is an abbreviated version of that larger piece.

Introduction

Businesses have long expected design to deliver measurable returns. 20 years ago UX design was incredibly impactful to the profitability of organizations. Early UX developments were revolutionary. New digital products enabled businesses to evolve and maximize their business outcomes in the digital era. Thus, it was easy to see the value UX design brought to business. Over the last decades, UX designers have used their skills to understand customer needs, design and evolve the digital business systems that companies rely on to deliver products and services to customers.

However, today our digital business ecosystems are mature, many with well-established design systems in place. Unfortunately, design enhancements are less likely to generate the business impact they once did. Meanwhile, business leaders, increasingly detached from customers, often fail to grasp the impact of human experiences on success, further widening the gap between business and design. For these reasons, designers have largely lost their strategic influence. Instead of driving decisions on what to build, many designers have been relegated to a custodial role, maintaining interfaces rather than shaping business outcomes.

In addition, AI-driven automation is reshaping the role of design in modern business, reducing the need for product-level design services and further collapsing the value proposition of design in business.

Ultimately, business leaders view design as an investment that must demonstrate a clear return, making it essential for designers to reposition themselves as strategic problem-solvers rather than mere custodians of aesthetics. This shift has placed design leadership at a crossroads.

An Open Door for Strategic Design Leadership Through Journey Management

Design can and must evolve to meet business expectations and prove its measurable impact.

Many companies are already seeing the effects of poor customer experience —reflected in customer churn, slow response time to CX insights, declining revenue and NPS scores, rising support costs, shrinking margins, and reduced product or service usage. These are just a few of the key indicators that things are going in the wrong direction for the business.

Design leaders must leverage these data as warning signs and offer a much-needed solution for business success. By demonstrating the opportunities for innovation, problem solving, and measurable impact at the customer journey level, design can position itself as a driver of loyalty and growth.

Achieving Journey Management Maturity

Customer Journey Management unites UX and CX into a journey-centric practice that researches, measures, and improves journey experiences across the entire customer lifecycle. Effectively, this shift moves design strategy up a level from the product level to journey level and allows design to solve business problems in a way that most business leaders have never envisioned.

In large organizations with fragmented digital ecosystems that don’t serve customers well as they traverse across channels, this is open frontier for design innovation and business impact.

Even more, customer success in traversing these journeys to do business means that journey performance (not product experience) is directly correlated to business performance. Thus, journey-centric design enables design leaders to finally speak the language of business—using metrics and data to prove how customer experience drives growth.

Such a shift repositions design as a strategic contributor, capable of demonstrating how delivering value to customers results in measurable returns for the business and radically reinvent how we think about the economic value of design.

The Three Stages of Journey Management Maturity

1. Journey-centric design operations

2. Journey analytics and orchestration

3. Journey economics

Stage 1: Journey-centric Design Operations

Journey-centric design refers to the operational approach to design that puts the customer journey at the center, designing the the end-to end experience across touchpoints. This shift requires collaboration frameworks, collective design strategy planning, and may require resource re-distribution to allow for coherent cross-channel actions that deliver better outcomes for customers and the business.

Journey-centric operations enable Journey Management — The ongoing practice of measuring and managing journey experience and performance like products. Teams of specialists and cross-functional stakeholders apply user-centered design and problem solving to journey experiences. Here there is much opportunity for innovation, improved customer experiences, and optimization for better business outcomes.

Stage 2: Journey Analytics and Orchestration

This second stage of journey-management maturity focuses on leveraging journey analytics to systematically analyze customer interactions across all journey touchpoints.

Journey analytics platforms collect, model, and analyze data from various sources for a holistic view of each customer and their context. The insights help companies understand customer behavior, identify pain points, measure journey performance, and identify statistically validated drivers of journey profitability. In some cases with identified profitability drivers, organizations can forecast and measure the ROI of journey improvements aimed at maximizing the potential of profitability drivers.

Some journey analytics platforms also allow teams to track what truly matters, authentic human experiences. The collect insights in real-time about customer emotions, perceptions, and behaviors through messaging for micro-feedback with customers as they progress through the journey toward their goal. These data are used for the creation of Experiential Metrics, giving business leaders foretelling insights into the human experiences that are driving their business success. Design leaders will finally be able to such metrics to corporate performance dashboards, replacing the problematic proxy metrics(NPS, CSAT) used in the past.

Such tools provide rich insights to journey managers and designers, informing strategy and prioritization of opportunities.

Some journey analytics tools also allow for journey orchestration, in which a journey manager can identify specific customer cohorts to deliver contextual and personalized nudges to ensure the right value elements are communicated effectively and motivate customers toward completion.

Journey orchestration capabilities are in their infancy today. However with the power of AI-driven analysis of historical behavioral data, such tools will be able to anticipate individual customer needs in real time, taking targeted actions meet their needs in the moment, resolve friction, and guide customers toward their goals

Stage 3: Journey Analytics: Analyze Cost and Profitability

Journey Economics—the third stage of journey management—focuses on the financial impact of customer journeys. With journey analytics in place, organizations can assess costs, profitability, and outcomes at each touchpoint and for the entire journey. With this, teams can proactively address friction points, optimize experiences, and activate business levers to improve both customer value and business results.

Journey Economics not only empowers data-driven design strategies. It also equips design leaders to connect CX investments with financial performance, supporting strategic conversations with executives and aligning CX strategies with broader business objectives.

Conclusion

The role of design is at a turning point. To reclaim strategic influence, design must evolve beyond product-level execution and prove its business impact. Journey Management Maturity offers a clear path forward—through design innovation, analytics, and economics—to connect customer experience directly to financial outcomes.

By adopting a journey-centric approach, design leaders can transform CX from an intangible concept into a measurable, results-driven discipline. This empowers organizations to make smarter decisions, improve customer outcomes, and accelerate growth.

Journey Management repositions design not as a support function, but as a core driver of business strategy in the age of AI. The opportunity is here—for design to lead again.

Read the full article, "Journey Management Maturity: Radically Reinventing Design’s Business Impact."