One of my goals this year is to streamline the process and improve the experience of educators and other colleagues who engage engage with the outputs (products and services) from projects that I lead and contribute to. It’s not an insignificant task and I’m not starting from scratch, but the big challenge for me is linking all of the disparate processes and closely-related activities together, as well as connect the three different teams within the portfolio who are crucial for success.

As noted by Kate Kaplan in When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps, journey maps create a vision of the entire customer journey, they become a tool for creating cross-department conversation and collaboration. Knowing who is doing what, and when is is crucial – identifying the key touchpoints across each stage and working to assign them to the relevant team(s) means there’s capacity and capability for the work to be done – it also contributes to a frictionless experience for the educator as they’re ‘seamlessly passed’ from team to team throughout their journey.

I worked with other leads and contributors from within the portfolio for a discovery session, which is resulted in a full and rich whiteboard that mapped the educator journey – great stuff!

Whiteboarding is a great first step to get ideas down. For more flexibility and to better support iteration and input from others something more shareable and collaborative was needed – I went with a Figma-based Figjam to map out the journey!

Figjam was perfect for highly interactive collaborative sessions, but something else a little less messier and suitable for others is needed – I went with a Figma-based design file to map the journey!