The Illusion of Journey Management: Why Most Organizations Are Tuned In, But Tied Up
The Illusion of Journey Management: Why Most Organizations Are Tuned In, But Tied Up
The Illusion of Journey Management: Why Most Organizations Are Tuned In, But Tied Up
Jul 25, 2025
Most orgs track journey insights but can’t act on them. Insights don’t drive change without systems thinking to align teams and orchestrate action.
Many organizations claim to be managing customer journeys—but in reality, they’re mostly just observing them and putting out fires. They’ve built the sensors—insight programs, analytics tools, monthly reports, and dashboards—but not the internal operations required to meaningfully act on what they learn.
True journey management requires systems thinking: seeing the organization as an interconnected whole, capable of sensing and responding in coordination—not a collection of silos reacting in isolation.
Journey Management Has an Identity Crisis
Over the years, I’ve come to realize there are several philosophies about what journey management actually is. I’ve read dozens of articles offering different interpretations, and I’ve had conversations with peers in which we seemed to be speaking entirely different languages about the same topic.
I’ve identified 3 common schools of thought. Each seeks to improve journey performance, but with different emphases. In my view, the right approach incorporates elements of all three:
Insight Management and Reporting
Conversion Rate Optimization and Orchestration
Journey-Centric Design Operations
1. Insight Management and Reporting
One school of thought focuses on collecting and reporting end-to-end insights about the customer journey. This includes identifying pain points, surfacing themes in customer perceptions across the journey, and defining KPIs and benchmarks for success.
This is a critical part of the practice. Journey management software supports this approach by aggregating and visualizing journey insights to inform the broader organization. However, many perspectives on journey management stop here.
But then what? How does the organization define a strategy and facilitate improvement? With functional groups and product teams still working independently, the insights might increase awareness or influence individual actions—but they rarely lead to unified goals or coordinated progress.
I’ve seen organizations take this approach. It’s a start, but many of the journey’s core problems persist. Teams interpret insights through their own siloed lenses. Some improvements happen, but fragmentation remains.
2. Conversion Rate Optimization and Orchestration
Another view frames journey management as a way to improve business performance by optimizing the customer flow toward desired outcomes. Software tools in this space often focus on analytics, finding bottlenecks, and identifying drop-off points—sometimes offering nudges or interventions to keep users on track.
Of course, making the journey more effective for the business is part of the goal. But this perspective often overlooks the experience-design side of journey performance. It doesn’t ask why the bottlenecks exist, or why drop-off occurs. In my eyes, journey management must include fixing the problems that inhibit performance—through UX research and design.
Even when analytics are paired with qualitative insights to understand friction points, the same core challenge remains: How will the organization coordinate across silos to resolve problems.
Sometimes a journey pain point is isolated—something a single product team can fix. But often, real solutions require collaboration between different parts of the organization, business teams, operations, technology, and multiple product teams for example. This leads to the third—and, in my opinion, most crucial aspect.
3. Journey-Centric Design Operations
This philosophy emphasizes the operational systems needed to truly manage and improve journeys. It’s where I put most of my focus—because you can’t manage journeys without an operational framework that enables service improvements through cross-functional coordination.
Maybe this is because I come from the UX world, where user-centered design is the focus. But to be clear: I believe all three schools of thought have value. Insight reporting and analytics are essential—but these are table stakes, they aren’t the full solution.
Journey-centric design operations is the hard part. And it’s often ignored by those focused solely on data collection or conversion. However, what good is having insights without coordinated action? And if the journey itself is fundamentally flawed, the solution isn’t to nudge customers through to completion. My stance is that you can’t truly manage journeys without making user-centered design part of the equation, and that requires operational alignment.
A Quick Example: Transparency in the Mortgage Process
Imagine a bank offering home mortgage loans. Customer surveys reveal low satisfaction and a recurring theme: the process lacks transparency.
In many organizations, this insight gets routed to the communications team, who set up automated status emails. But that’s a narrow solution rooted in siloed thinking. It doesn’t consider the full journey.
A journey-centric organization would go deeper: What do customers really mean by “lack of transparency”? What are their information needs? How do they want to feel informed?
The solution may not be more emails. It might be a combination of clearer content during the research phase, a real-time status dashboard in the app, and a well-designed onboarding packet delivered by mail. The problem—transparency—is a multi-touchpoint issue. The solution must be multi-faceted, coordinated, and grounded in user-centered design.
That kind of coordination only happens when you have an operational system in place to turn insight into action—across departments.
Insights to Action: A System for Good Journey Design
To build that kind of operation, we need to apply systems thinking—designing internal structures that make the organization nimble, collaborative, and capable of improving the journey across touchpoints owned by different teams.
Think of how another system converts insight into action: the human body.
Imagine you're lost in a jungle. Your senses—hearing, sight, smell—detect a potential threat. You hear something approaching. Your brain processes the signals and creates a response: Run! Your central nervous system coordinates your body: legs move, arms pump, heart rate increases, adrenaline kicks in.
Without the brain and nervous system, your body couldn’t respond effectively. You’d maybe jump around and flail your arms or freeze in place—responses, yes, but uncoordinated and ineffective.
Organizations are the same. We have sensors (insights and analytics). But do we have a brain to turn that information into strategy? Do we have a central nervous system that aligns product, marketing, tech, and operations to move together?
That’s what journey-centric operations provide. Without them, we’re not managing the journey. We’re reacting—jumping, flailing, or freezing—without a cohesive response.
Conclusion
Most organizations are wired to sense—but not to act.
Without a central coordinating system—like the nervous system in the body—there’s no way to interpret signals and mobilize a meaningful response. Journey management isn't just about awareness. It’s about building the connective tissue that links insight to intentional, organization-wide movement.
Many organizations claim to be managing customer journeys—but in reality, they’re mostly just observing them and putting out fires. They’ve built the sensors—insight programs, analytics tools, monthly reports, and dashboards—but not the internal operations required to meaningfully act on what they learn.
True journey management requires systems thinking: seeing the organization as an interconnected whole, capable of sensing and responding in coordination—not a collection of silos reacting in isolation.
Journey Management Has an Identity Crisis
Over the years, I’ve come to realize there are several philosophies about what journey management actually is. I’ve read dozens of articles offering different interpretations, and I’ve had conversations with peers in which we seemed to be speaking entirely different languages about the same topic.
I’ve identified 3 common schools of thought. Each seeks to improve journey performance, but with different emphases. In my view, the right approach incorporates elements of all three:
Insight Management and Reporting
Conversion Rate Optimization and Orchestration
Journey-Centric Design Operations
1. Insight Management and Reporting
One school of thought focuses on collecting and reporting end-to-end insights about the customer journey. This includes identifying pain points, surfacing themes in customer perceptions across the journey, and defining KPIs and benchmarks for success.
This is a critical part of the practice. Journey management software supports this approach by aggregating and visualizing journey insights to inform the broader organization. However, many perspectives on journey management stop here.
But then what? How does the organization define a strategy and facilitate improvement? With functional groups and product teams still working independently, the insights might increase awareness or influence individual actions—but they rarely lead to unified goals or coordinated progress.
I’ve seen organizations take this approach. It’s a start, but many of the journey’s core problems persist. Teams interpret insights through their own siloed lenses. Some improvements happen, but fragmentation remains.
2. Conversion Rate Optimization and Orchestration
Another view frames journey management as a way to improve business performance by optimizing the customer flow toward desired outcomes. Software tools in this space often focus on analytics, finding bottlenecks, and identifying drop-off points—sometimes offering nudges or interventions to keep users on track.
Of course, making the journey more effective for the business is part of the goal. But this perspective often overlooks the experience-design side of journey performance. It doesn’t ask why the bottlenecks exist, or why drop-off occurs. In my eyes, journey management must include fixing the problems that inhibit performance—through UX research and design.
Even when analytics are paired with qualitative insights to understand friction points, the same core challenge remains: How will the organization coordinate across silos to resolve problems.
Sometimes a journey pain point is isolated—something a single product team can fix. But often, real solutions require collaboration between different parts of the organization, business teams, operations, technology, and multiple product teams for example. This leads to the third—and, in my opinion, most crucial aspect.
3. Journey-Centric Design Operations
This philosophy emphasizes the operational systems needed to truly manage and improve journeys. It’s where I put most of my focus—because you can’t manage journeys without an operational framework that enables service improvements through cross-functional coordination.
Maybe this is because I come from the UX world, where user-centered design is the focus. But to be clear: I believe all three schools of thought have value. Insight reporting and analytics are essential—but these are table stakes, they aren’t the full solution.
Journey-centric design operations is the hard part. And it’s often ignored by those focused solely on data collection or conversion. However, what good is having insights without coordinated action? And if the journey itself is fundamentally flawed, the solution isn’t to nudge customers through to completion. My stance is that you can’t truly manage journeys without making user-centered design part of the equation, and that requires operational alignment.
A Quick Example: Transparency in the Mortgage Process
Imagine a bank offering home mortgage loans. Customer surveys reveal low satisfaction and a recurring theme: the process lacks transparency.
In many organizations, this insight gets routed to the communications team, who set up automated status emails. But that’s a narrow solution rooted in siloed thinking. It doesn’t consider the full journey.
A journey-centric organization would go deeper: What do customers really mean by “lack of transparency”? What are their information needs? How do they want to feel informed?
The solution may not be more emails. It might be a combination of clearer content during the research phase, a real-time status dashboard in the app, and a well-designed onboarding packet delivered by mail. The problem—transparency—is a multi-touchpoint issue. The solution must be multi-faceted, coordinated, and grounded in user-centered design.
That kind of coordination only happens when you have an operational system in place to turn insight into action—across departments.
Insights to Action: A System for Good Journey Design
To build that kind of operation, we need to apply systems thinking—designing internal structures that make the organization nimble, collaborative, and capable of improving the journey across touchpoints owned by different teams.
Think of how another system converts insight into action: the human body.
Imagine you're lost in a jungle. Your senses—hearing, sight, smell—detect a potential threat. You hear something approaching. Your brain processes the signals and creates a response: Run! Your central nervous system coordinates your body: legs move, arms pump, heart rate increases, adrenaline kicks in.
Without the brain and nervous system, your body couldn’t respond effectively. You’d maybe jump around and flail your arms or freeze in place—responses, yes, but uncoordinated and ineffective.
Organizations are the same. We have sensors (insights and analytics). But do we have a brain to turn that information into strategy? Do we have a central nervous system that aligns product, marketing, tech, and operations to move together?
That’s what journey-centric operations provide. Without them, we’re not managing the journey. We’re reacting—jumping, flailing, or freezing—without a cohesive response.
Conclusion
Most organizations are wired to sense—but not to act.
Without a central coordinating system—like the nervous system in the body—there’s no way to interpret signals and mobilize a meaningful response. Journey management isn't just about awareness. It’s about building the connective tissue that links insight to intentional, organization-wide movement.
