Journey Mapping: A Product Development Process Case Study

Underpinning every successful product is a successful 产品开发过程. 作为Toptal的高级产品经理, I’ve found that treating that process as a product in its own right results in measurable improvements that touch every facet of our work.

The team I lead comprises an engineering manager, nine 软件工程师，一名质量保证工程师. Our work covers a wide spectrum of products and features that facilitate a healthy supply-and-demand balance for our talent network. 在接下来的部分中, I share how we evolved our 产品开发过程 using 客户旅程地图 and arrived at greater efficiency, 沟通, 和协作.

When the Process Is the Product, the Team Is the User

Products that are unsuccessful or ineffective often result from what a team, 甚至是一个人, 认为 users want and need, not what they actually want and need. 好产品, 然而, is built on the qualitative and quantitative data derived from extensive user 研究 会话. 同样的, the 产品开发过程 itself can be unsuccessful or ineffective when it is designed by a leader who assumes they know what their teams need.

As 产品经理 或者团队领导, you should engage in the same kind of 用户研究 that you would carry out for a product—shadowing, 面试, and surveying—with your team to make sure your process is similarly successful. The goal is to understand how your team is using the 产品开发过程 and address any 痛点 they encounter along the way.

构建客户旅程地图

There are various ways to collect feedback from users, but 客户旅程地图 is the product discovery technique I use with my engineers. The result is a diagram that illustrates the steps users go through when engaging with your company, 无论是通过产品, 在线体验, 零售经验, 服务, 或者它们的任意组合. The more touchpoints your users have, the more complicated—and therefore necessary—a map becomes.

This technique explores users’ actions and 情绪 around that engagement to reveal 痛点 and opportunities. It’s an excellent way to uncover problems in your process.

Within the diagram, users are depicted as hypothetical personas. 每个角色都应该有一个简短的个人介绍, including a description of their inner motivations and responsibilities, 因为这有助于使他们人性化. Each persona should represent a key type of user to offer a sense of the diverse wants and needs the solution must address.

旅程地图是按用户阶段组织的. Each stage represents a major goal the user is trying to achieve in their overall journey. For each stage, and for each persona, ask your team to consider:

• 动作:用户做什么?
• 情感:用户的感受?
• 痛点:困扰用户的东西?
• Opportunities: What are some possible solutions?

Asking the team “What bothers you about this product and how can we fix it?” would not be a useful way to gather information because, 在提问的时候, they may not recall use cases or how they felt when they experienced an issue. Asking them to split the interaction into steps and asking them how users encounter each step helps the team surface the 情绪 associated with each stage of the journey.

将这一理论应用于我们的整体团队

To understand how this theory applies in action, consider the journey map for the 产品开发过程 that I created with my engineering team.

使用 米罗, 我制作了旅程地图板, splitting the 产品开发过程 into eight major stages:

• Roadmap Planning, and Defining Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
• 产品规格
• 技术分析和工作分解
• 实现
• Quality Assurance and User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
• 预发布
• 释放
• 发布后的

I chose two personas—software engineer and 产品经理—as these are the main users who engage with the process.

• 软件工程师谢尔盖: Sergey ensures the initiatives are delivered on time and to a high standard, while maintaining a robust code base and understanding of the latest technologies and tools.
• 产品经理马特: Matt ensures the team prioritizes its efforts by working on the most impactful initiatives first. He also listens to stakeholder needs and communicates updates to the team regularly.

会议前, 我帮马特填写了旅行地图, 我的角色, in order to get an idea of how much time was required to complete the exercise, as well as to set the team’s expectations of the format. 下一个, I scheduled two 90-minute 会话 across two consecutive days to ensure my team had enough time to complete the exercise without losing focus or energy. Because most engineers are unfamiliar with the journey mapping process, I shared links to the 米罗 board and a YouTube tutorial to help them prepare. Before the beginning of the first session, I confirmed that everyone understood the concepts.

作为主持人, 我让团队提出行动建议, 情绪, 痛点, 也为谢尔盖的角色提供了机会. 一些团队成员一开始很害羞, 但有一次，几个人分享了他们的想法, 会议开始进行. I filled out cards on the 米罗 board based on their input.

Key Learnings From the Journey Mapping Process

The journey mapping process yielded five main takeaways:

1. 保持会议的简短和集中. If there are more than a few stages within the journey map, I advise splitting the effort into two or three 会话 to maximize productivity and to prevent team members from losing focus.
2. 做一个榜样. 填写 产品经理 泳道前的会话设置 tone of honesty and openness, and demonstrates how to express these issues, encouraging team members to share their own 情绪 and 痛点 more readily.
3. 创造情感安全感. Team members may find it intimidating to share their struggles—most likely from a fear of being judged—but try your best not to intervene. Sooner or later, a more courageous team member will break the ice and things will start 移动. When that happens, show empathy and appreciation. 这将使其他成员国放心 that they are in a safe environment and they will feel more comfortable sharing their 的想法.
4. 和你的团队一起制定一个后续计划. Some problems may be hard to solve, especially if the solution involves other teams or departments, but plan to keep your team updated about any relevant 沟通 with, or changes from, those responsible parties who may impact 旅程绘图过程的结果.
5. 以行动步骤结束. Create a list of action items, and assign an owner and deadline to each, which will help you realize tangible results from the session. 举几个例子 resulted in our case are depicted in the following table:

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为什么 Was the Journey Mapping Exercise Effective?

The journey mapping exercise was extremely successful in presenting potential opportunities for improvement and fostering team spirit. 它在以下方面帮助了我们:

1. It uncovered issues where I believed things were running smoothly and reinforced the importance of not making assumptions. For example, I assumed that everyone had sufficient training on Jira但事实并非如此. 在光谱的另一端, I thought asking the engineering team to record demo videos for new pieces of functionality burdened them, when in fact they valued the exercise because it helped them improve their presentation techniques and lessened their anxiety around being in front of a camera.
2. It illuminated some improvements I could make, such as restructuring initiative cover pages to make them more accessible for engineers.
3. It empowered the engineering team to take responsibility for the outcomes within their control because they were the ones proposing changes that they could test and further iterate. 这主要是一个自下而上的过程.
4. It revealed that the pain point hot spots were predominantly around roadmap planning and 实现.
5. It forged stronger working relationships among the team by acknowledging shared challenges. For example, a number of individuals on our team thought they were the only ones struggling with the CI / CD管道 for a particular subsystem when, in fact, most of the team was struggling.

扩展的考虑

如果每个产品经理或 工程部团队领导 和他们的团队一起经历这个过程, 可能会出现一系列常见的问题, indicating which issues should be addressed first. Teams should follow the updated process for a few months, then the feedback loop must be revisited again. This cycle should continue until the 产品开发过程 is natural and easy, and supports the needs of the users in building top-quality software products.

In the case of my team, our new process has delivered tangible improvements on several fronts:

• The average time for tickets in review has been reduced by 22%.
• The product OKR completion rate has risen above 90% over the course of the last three quarters.
• The 服务-level agreement time for high-priority bugs has been met in 100% of cases.
• There have been no failed 释放s due to deployment problems.
• The average number of post-释放 reported bugs has decreased by 37%.

如果你的团队参与了 建筑产品, then your process should be subject to continuous scrutiny and improvement. 如果一个函数没有很好地执行, or if its 产品开发过程 is weaker, 这将影响最终结果. While I used this practice for an engineering team, it can easily translate to 用户研究、设计、 UI / UX，以及内容团队.

Your 产品开发过程 is your most important product. Use this exercise to help perfect it, and see how much it elevates every product your team makes.