Building rituals to enable journey management: why gathering voices is the first step

Journey management thrives when it’s treated as a ritual, not an afterthought. The first step is straightforward but often overlooked: gather everyone who holds customer insights. This includes customer care teams, who are too often dismissed as only dealing with small, isolated complaints, and researchers or anyone else with direct customer contact. This diverse group can then collectively assess the pain points and opportunities from the customer experience. From here, these insights need to be translated into feasible, viable solutions through collaboration between technical and business teams. The process culminates in rapid testing and iteration through an MVP (minimum viable product) approach—creating, testing, and refining solutions. In short, journey management needs to follow a structured, ritualized approach to work efficiently, aligning people, insights, and decisions in a continuous loop.

Why it matters

Ignoring the voices closest to the customer experience—especially those in customer care—leads to fragmented insights, missed opportunities, and flawed solutions.

There are three steps that we have been taking in-house to manifest the approach of the triple diamond:

Step 1 — Gathering insights from all relevant teams.

The first “diamond” in the triple diamond model is about discovering and diagnosing the problem. By bringing in all those with direct access to customer insights, such as customer care, UX researchers, and sales, you start with a well-rounded picture of customer pain points. The problem? Many businesses skip this or silo these insights. And when they do gather feedback, it’s often from more “strategic” roles, ignoring the front-line teams who hear the day-to-day struggles.

Common pitfall

Organizations tend to focus on higher-level feedback from leadership or research, disregarding direct reports from customer care. This leads to a disconnect between real customer frustrations and the way these are addressed in solutions.

Step 2 — Assessing and prioritizing the pain points.

Now comes the second key ritual: making sense of the insights. During this phase, teams work to assess which problems cause the most friction in the customer experience. By scoring these pain points in terms of customer impact, this phase begins to move from the discovery into opportunity mapping.

The idea is simple: not all problems are created equal. But often, the decision on which problems to tackle is made without clear data. When prioritization happens without fully assessing the pain or cost to the customer, businesses may waste resources on fixing non-critical issues.

Common pitfall

Jumping to solutions too quickly without validating which pain points matter most to the customer experience. Organizations may assume they know the "big" issues without actually prioritizing based on customer input.

Step 3 — Moving from opportunities to implementation loops.

The final “diamond” is about creating solutions, testing, and refining them. Once the most significant pain points are identified, the next step is turning them into opportunities, which are then filtered for technical feasibility and business viability. This is where cross-functional teams—combining people with customer insights and those with the technical know-how—start building solutions, testing them through MVPs, and adjusting based on real-world feedback.

It’s critical that these cycles don’t just happen once. Ritualizing journey management means creating continuous loops of feedback and iteration. The point is to move from insights to action quickly, learn from those actions, and adjust. But this stage often fails when teams don’t establish a rhythm of regular testing and learning.

Common pitfall

The MVP stage can fail if teams don’t embrace an iterative mindset. Too many businesses want a "finished" solution too soon, avoiding the necessary feedback loops that could refine the idea into something truly effective.

What this approach builds:

• A unified view of customer pain points from the most relevant teams.

• Opportunities rooted in real-world feedback, not assumptions.

• Faster learning and iteration cycles to improve customer experience.

Further reading:

1. "Journey Management: The Secret to Successful Customer-Centric Strategies" - HBR, 2023.

2. "The Triple Diamond Model: From Design to Service Innovation" - Service Design Network Journal, 2022.

3. "Why MVP is Still the Best Approach for Innovation" - UX Collective, 2023.

4. "From Insight to Implementation: Turning Customer Feedback into Action" - McKinsey Quarterly, 2023.

5. "Breaking Silos: Integrating Customer Care with Journey Mapping" - Forrester Research, 2024.