Journey Management Maturity: Radically Reinventing Design’s Business Impact

Issue #26 - Co-Authored by The X-Mentor and Kim Flaherty.

Summary

A company's future success lies in Mastering Journey Management, the key to driving customer value and business impact through experience design.

But how can we pivot from the current perception of Design as a Custodial Service?

And what can we do to address the collapsing value proposition of Design?

Businesses have long-awaited design to deliver measurable returns. More than 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 past decade, UX researchers and designers have played a pivotal role in understanding customer needs and shaping the digital business systems that companies depend on to deliver their products and services.

However, today our digital business ecosystems are mature, many with well-established design systems in place. Unfortunately, the business impact once driven by UX design enhancements is steadily diminishing, signaling a collapse in their value proposition. Meanwhile, business leaders are becoming increasingly disconnected from customers, and they often lack insight into how human experiences drive success. As a result, they see design as less strategic and less essential. Instead of driving decisions on what to build as they once did, Design has now been relegated to a custodial role, maintaining interfaces rather than shaping strategy and driving business outcomes.

Additionally, AI is further collapsing the value proposition of design. The locus of control is now shifting from manual execution toward higher-level strategic direction and design decision-making. With tools like ChatGPT, teams are unlocking expert-level UX insights and then quickly producing outputs, using just a few prompts. This shift to AI-assisted UX is a mere glimpse into the future of Strategic Design at the speed of thought.

As technology accelerates, we’re often left to navigate the unintended social impacts left in its wake. With design no longer confined to the dissolving boundaries of traditional UX and CX, the domain will be a rich, interconnected web of experience spanning channels, contexts, and time. It demands more than isolated moments of creativity; it calls for orchestrated, intentional journeys. In this transforming landscape, Journey Management Maturity becomes essential for creating experiences that are responsible, human-centered, and measurably impactful for businesses.

People Are Feeling The Shift

Design Leadership is Freaking Out. Senior design leadership is under pressure as many top design executive roles are being eliminated in major companies, a shift tied to broader economic challenges and shifting business priorities. While some blame poor integration of design into business models, others argue this is a broader tech sector reset, and not a failure of design itself. The elimination of these roles reflects a deeper uncertainty about design’s long-term strategic value at the executive level. In response, many design leaders are turning toward reinvention, forming new networks and launching hybrid, entrepreneurially driven ventures that blend advisory services, training, and AI-enabled products. These moves reflect a more business-savvy, diversified approach to design leadership, potentially signaling a new, more resilient era for Design professionals beyond traditional roles and organizational boundaries.

Business Leadership Don’t Have a Reliable Playbook. Business leadership is struggling without a reliable playbook as traditional performance metrics, centered on shareholder value and financial efficiency, fail to account for the human dynamics driving long-term success. Workers are often reduced to cost line items, while decisions prioritize cost savings over human impact. Amidst rising investor pressure, economic uncertainty, and global disruptions, CEOs themselves are burning out, with a record-high turnover and 71% experiencing a crisis of confidence. Boards, under pressure from activist investors, are quicker to replace leadership, reflecting a volatile environment where past strategies and playbooks no longer guarantee stability or growth.

Design Practitioners Must Become More Business Savvy. CX and UX design teams need to become more business savvy by deeply understanding their company’s strategy, goals, objectives, and key metrics, recognizing that great design is inseparable from business impact. Designers should approach business with the same curiosity they bring to users, asking why decisions are made and how design contributes to outcomes like retention and growth. At the same time, business leaders must foster a culture of transparency and collaboration, openly sharing business context and involving design in strategic discussions. In today’s digital-first world, where user experience directly drives business success, strong cross-functional alignment and mutual education between design and business are essential for long-term value creation.

Journey Management Is Filling the Gap. This is the discipline of mapping, measuring, and optimizing end-to-end customer and user journeys. It looks beyond individual interactions to understand how people move across platforms, services, and ecosystems. It bridges the gap between strategy and execution, which enables design to shift from tactical and reactive to strategic and proactive. Without Journey Management, design risks becoming disconnected from the actual paths users take. Design teams may over-optimize one moment in the journey while neglecting the cumulative experience. But with Journey Management, organizations can uncover friction points, prioritize improvements, and monitor outcomes in real-time.

The New Playbook for Design Leadership

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. This is reflected in customer churn, slow response time to CX insights, declining revenue and NPS scores, flat or declining NRR (Net Revenue Retention), 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 the preeminent driver of customer value, which ultimately drives business success. Why else does a business exist in the first place? And who else is better positioned to understand and meet the needs of customers better than human-centered designers?

Why Great Experience Design is Essential

1. Loyalty – The perception of high value exchange with your business means more customers are likely to remain a customer, which is more cost-effective than acquiring new customers.

2. Reputation – Satisfied customers create a mental short-cut in their brain that emotionally informs a perception of your brand, which in turn translates into action, typically in the form of sharing their positive experiences, either by word-of-mouth or digital advocacy for your brand.

3. Differentiation – In competitive markets, especially ones saturated with comparable product or services, the ones that truly stand out from the rest are the offerings that have more perceived value, not necessarily the cheapest. Creating unique value helps you not only stand out from the rest, but also helps you justify your pricing or positioning.

4. Profitability – Customers are willing to pay more when they value your product or service. The higher perceived value enables better margins, and long-term financial health for your business.

5. Innovation – Customer value helps guide business decisions. And Design Researchers have a superior understanding about what customers care about because they have the skills necessary to uncover unmet human needs and how best to satisfy them. Those with the superior understanding of human needs are best positioned to evolve your products, services, and experiences so that you can stay ahead of the curve—creating a cycle of innovation and improvement.

6. Growth – Trust is essential for long-term relationships. Those relationships lead to growth that’s both sustainable and fast. A “Growth Engine” is all about Customer Value. Everything else is a byproduct.

CASE STUDY: How Apple Creates Value-to-Customers

1. Product Design & User Experience: Apple doesn't just sell phones or laptops, they design a seamless, intuitive, and elegant experience. The design of their devices, operating systems, and even packaging reflects attention to what customers want: simplicity, beauty, and functionality.

2. Ecosystem Integration: The Apple ecosystem (iPhone, Mac, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, etc.) works together so smoothly that it adds significant convenience and value. Handoff, AirDrop, iCloud syncing—all of it creates a "stickiness" that makes switching to a competitor inconvenient.

3. Brand Loyalty: Apple customers often become fans. That's the result of consistently creating value through great products, memorable marketing, and responsive customer service. That loyalty translates into repeat purchases and enthusiastic word-of-mouth.

4. Customer Support: Apple Stores and the Genius Bar offer top-tier in-person support, which enhances the value of ownership. Customers know they can get help when they need it.

5. Emotional Connection & Status: Apple products often carry a sense of prestige or identity. People don’t just use Apple products, they feel something about them emotionally. That emotional layer adds intangible value that’s hard for competitors (e.g., Samsung) to replicate.

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BUSINESS RESULTS:

• One of the most valuable companies in the world.

• Massive profit margins on hardware and services.

• High customer retention and satisfaction rates.

Apple’s success is the perfect case study in how delivering consistently, evolving customer value across multiple, intertwined customer journeys fuels long-term business dominance.

Traditional CX Practices Need to Evolve

Journey Maps & Service Blueprints Are Defective – Traditional CX design practices, particularly journey mapping, fall short by offering overly simplistic, linear, and generalized representations of customer experiences that rarely reflect the complexity of real-world behaviors. As Graham Hill critically asserts in his X-Interview, most journey maps are created without meaningful customer involvement, relying instead on internal assumptions that often serve business goals over customer needs. This results in misleading frameworks that ignore the diverse, non-linear, and unique paths customers take, leading to flawed service design decisions. Moreover, journey maps frequently lack the depth and operational detail needed for actual implementation, failing to consider key behind-the-scenes elements like processes, data, and governance. With an estimated 70–80% failure rate, these tools often create inflated expectations while delivering little actionable value, ultimately becoming costly artifacts—what Hill calls “the world’s most expensive wallpaper.”

Operational Realignment for Journey-Centric Design

“The CX World and the UX World are both scaling toward each other,

with journeys being that unit of change.”

To support journey-centric design and journey management, organizations must realign their operations to support the shift in focus from product design to a more holistic, customer journey-oriented framework for design. As Kim Flaherty describes in her X-Interview, the problem around Journey Management is two-dimensional:

1. Horizontally: Across siloed departments responsible for a patchwork of disconnected journey touchpoints.

2. Vertically: Where strategic CX goals fail to cascade meaningfully to product teams and UX practitioners.

Rather than dismantling existing structures, companies should reimagine how they work. This involves creating collaboration frameworks and processes, deployed across siloed departments, that enables coordinated end-to-end journey design and optimization.

Moreover, companies need to establish a prioritization framework that aligns both journey-centric and product-centric efforts with overarching business objectives. To achieve this end, we are seeing that CX and UX are converging within companies to make this shift. While UX traditionally focuses on single-session product interactions, CX has roots in customer support and broader brand experience, and today both disciplines are scaling toward journey-level thinking, where users’ goals and the effort required to achieve them become central.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-and-cx-merge/

This evolution allows for a shared vision and integrated execution across UX and CX, where journey management then becomes the critical layer for connecting interaction design with long-term customer relationship outcomes and business impact.

Achieving Journey Management Maturity

The Three Stages of Journey Management Maturity

1. Design: Establish Journey-centric Design and Experiential Metrics.

2. Analyze: Enable Journey Analytics and Orchestration.

3. Economics: Manage Cost and Profitability through Journey Economics.

Journey Management elevates design from isolated creativity to strategic orchestration. It empowers designers, product owners, and business leaders to co-create experiences that are not only delightful but also purposeful, efficient, and sustainable.

As we stand at this defining crossroads, the future of design will be shaped not just by how things look or work, but by how well we understand, manage, and evolve the journeys that matter most to our customers. Here’s our approach to Journey Management Maturity.

Stage 1: Establish Journey-centric Design and Experiential Metrics

To move beyond mediocre customer experiences, businesses must shift the strategic focus of design from product-centric to a journey-centric model.

Journey-centric design refers to the operational approach to design that puts the customer journey at the center, designing 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 businesses.

Journey-centric operations enable Journey Management — The ongoing practice of measuring and managing journey experience and performance like products.

Journey management allows businesses to track what truly matters, Experiential Metrics. Experiential Metrics measure real-time emotions, perceptions, and behaviors, giving business leaders foretelling insights into the human experiences that are driving their business success.

Design leaders should start incorporating Experiential Metrics into corporate performance dashboards, replacing the problematic proxy metrics used in the past.

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 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 to meet their needs in the moment, resolve friction, and guide customers toward their goals.

Stage 3: Analyze Cost and Profitability Through Journey Economics

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 also 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, but it also equips design leaders to connect CX investments with financial performance. This fuels strategic conversations with executives and aligns CX strategies with broader business objectives.

Shifting Marketplace Power to the Customer

Today’s advanced technologies, such as real-time journey analytics, machine learning, and integrated customer data platforms, offer CX practitioners unprecedented visibility into the actual paths customers take as they pursue their goals. These tools move beyond static, oversimplified journey maps by dynamically capturing the nonlinear, fragmented nature of real-world experiences across channels and touchpoints. Armed with this data, practitioners can not only identify friction and optimize journeys but also analyze the economics of experience: quantifying the financial impact and profitability of helping more customers successfully achieve their goals faster and more effectively. This insight enables organizations to align CX improvements with measurable business outcomes, transforming customer-centricity from a vague aspiration into a data-driven, ROI-positive strategy.

Dynamic Journey Mapping – Dynamic Journey Mapping is a customer experience tool that tracks and adapts to the evolving behaviors, goals, and contexts of different user types over time. Unlike static journey maps, it reflects multiple personalized paths based on real-time interactions—such as engagement levels, preferences, or lifecycle stage—allowing businesses to deliver tailored experiences, anticipate needs, and optimize touchpoints across the entire customer journey. This approach enhances customer satisfaction, loyalty, and business performance by ensuring every interaction feels relevant and timely.

Journey Analytics – Journey Analytics, combined with Journey Orchestration, enables businesses to track, analyze, and act on customer behaviors across all touchpoints in real time. While Journey Analytics uncovers insights into how customers navigate their journey—highlighting patterns, friction points, and opportunities—Journey Orchestration uses those insights to dynamically personalize and optimize next-best actions across channels. Together, these state-of-the-art capabilities empower brands to deliver timely, context-aware experiences that adapt to individual customer needs, driving higher engagement, satisfaction, and long-term loyalty.

Journey Economics – Journey Economics is the practice of measuring the financial impact of customer journeys by linking specific interactions and experiences to business outcomes such as revenue, cost, and customer lifetime value. It helps organizations quantify the ROI of customer experience initiatives by identifying which journeys drive the most value and where inefficiencies lead to losses. By understanding the economic drivers behind customer behavior, businesses can prioritize investments, optimize journeys, and align customer experience strategies with financial goals.

Business Case: Advancing Patient Journey Management to Solve Complex Healthcare Challenges

Executive Summary
The healthcare industry faces growing complexity: fragmented care experiences, rising patient expectations, operational inefficiencies, and increasing pressure to demonstrate value-based outcomes. Traditional patient journey mapping is no longer sufficient to navigate this landscape. By leveraging advanced technologies—such as real-time journey analytics, machine learning, and integrated data platforms—healthcare organizations can gain deep visibility into how patients interact across touchpoints. This evolution enables a shift from reactive, one-size-fits-all care to proactive, personalized, and economically optimized experiences that improve outcomes for patients, providers, and the system.

Vision for Future Healthcare Journeys
The future of Patient Journey Management in healthcare is dynamic, intelligent, and outcome focused. Three key capabilities will drive this transformation:

1. Dynamic Patient Journey Mapping
   Patients today navigate complex, nonlinear paths involving primary care, specialists, diagnostics, treatment, and follow-up. Dynamic journey mapping captures these real-time interactions, making it possible to adjust clinical needs, patient behavior, and social determinants of health. This enables healthcare providers to anticipate needs, reduce gaps in care, and deliver timely, personalized interventions that help both patients and providers to achieve their goals.

2. Journey Analytics and Orchestration
   Journey Analytics offers visibility into how patients move through the healthcare system, highlighting pain points such as missed appointments, long wait times, or treatment delays. Journey Orchestration goes a step further using those insights to trigger real-time, personalized actions like reminders, educational resources, or care team outreach. This coordination improves care continuity, adherence, and patient engagement, which enhances the effectiveness of healthcare.

3. Journey Economics
   By linking specific patient experiences to clinical and financial outcomes, Journey Economics allows organizations to measure the true value of care pathways. It helps prioritize investments in journeys that improve outcomes, reduce readmissions, increase cost-efficiency, supporting value-based care models and long-term sustainability. Journey Economics has the power and potential to transform healthcare affordability, helping shift healthcare from an economic privilege to a fundamental human right for all of society.

Solving Healthcare’s Core Challenges

• Fragmented Care Experiences: Seamlessly connect physical and digital touchpoints for more coordinated care.

• Poor Patient Engagement: Deliver relevant, timely communication based on real-time context.

• Operational Inefficiencies: Identify and resolve bottlenecks that waste time and resources.

• Lack of ROI Visibility: Quantify the impact of CX initiatives on health outcomes and costs.

Business and Clinical Value

• Better Health Outcomes: Through timely, personalized care and reduced friction.

• Improved Patient Satisfaction and Retention: Build trust with proactive, compassionate engagement.

• Increased Efficiency and Reduced Waste: Optimize patient flow and resource utilization.

• Support for Value-Based Care Models: Align patient experience with measurable financial and clinical goals.

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BUSINESS RESULTS:
In an era where healthcare must be both compassionate and cost-effective, advanced Journey Management provides a strategic path forward. With real-time insights, predictive personalization, and a clear view of economic impact, healthcare organizations can improve the patient experience while delivering better outcomes—making care more human, efficient, and sustainable.

Conclusion

Design stands at a pivotal crossroads, where its future relevance hinges on its ability to demonstrate measurable business impact. Journey Management Maturity offers a transformative framework for repositioning design as a strategic force that connects customer experience to tangible financial outcomes. By integrating journey-centric design, real-time analytics, and journey economics, organizations can shift from reactive service models to proactive, data-driven strategies that elevate customer value and business performance. In doing so, design moves beyond aesthetics and CX usability to become a core driver of innovation, growth, and competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving, AI-accelerated world.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Kim Flaherty is an independent experience design consultant at Resonant XD, specializing in omnichannel customer experiences and customer journey management.

Greg Parrott is The X-Mentor, helping businesses accelerate growth at The X-Mentor and publisher of The X-Mentor on Substack.