How to name the steps of your Customer Journey: A guide to aligning teams and terminology

Sérgio Tavares, ph.D.
Oct 2, 2024
3 min read

Updated: Feb 3

When naming the steps of a customer journey, you're engaging in a powerful and often politically charged process. Teams across your organization, each with its own agenda and perspective, will want to "name the world" according to what makes sense to them. This can create friction if left unmanaged, especially when different departments work in overlapping spaces. The key to alleviating this friction is adopting naming conventions that follow the user's experience rather than internal perspectives. Journey names should prioritize the clarity of the user's process, ensuring that each step makes intuitive sense from the customer's point of view.

Why it matters

Clear and user-centric naming conventions help align teams, streamline collaboration, and avoid confusion around critical terms. Misalignment on language can create operational inefficiencies, stagnation, and even sabotage scaling efforts.

Here’s why it’s essential to focus on these considerations

Different Teams, Different Perspectives. In a typical scenario, two teams working on product features may both believe they're working under "engagement," yet the user’s journey might actually split their tasks into distinct phases—perhaps one team should be focusing on "onboarding," while the other is rightly working on "engagement." This helps the organization avoid confusion and siloed efforts. The key to solving this is by ensuring that journey names are dictated by the user experience rather than internal team language.
Clarify Terms. It may sound obvious, but internal jargon can wildly differ across companies. One company might call a "conversion" the point when a user downloads a product, while another reserves "conversion" for actual monetary transactions. This is why it’s critical to hold a vocabulary alignment session where all teams agree on the definitions of terms they use daily. This clarity ensures everyone operates from the same playbook, reducing ambiguity and miscommunication between teams.
Don’t Seek Precision, Seek Accuracy. This point might seem counterintuitive, but let me explain. Precision in naming every minute step of the journey can bog teams down. Consider terms like "interest" vs. "intent," or "engagement" vs. "awareness"—what's the exact difference? Too much precision leads to analysis paralysis. Instead, focus on accuracy that captures the essence of the customer’s experience. The more we nitpick these small differences, the more we fall into what I like to call the "Saboteur Trap," which is reminiscent of tactics outlined in the CIA’s Declassified Simple Sabotage Field Manual. This manual highlighted how endless debates over small, inconsequential details could stymie productivity in organizations. In a journey context, this behavior can arise when teams spend too much time refining terms rather than focusing on scaling the customer experience.

Why Too Much Precision Can Lead to Sabotage

In the CIA's Declassified Manual of Sabotage, there’s a tactic aimed at derailing productive work: getting bogged down in endless discussion about what something means.

This subtle form of sabotage happens when people argue endlessly over precise definitions, delaying progress. The same thing happens in customer journey mapping when teams focus too much on pinpointing differences between terms like "interest" vs. "engagement" or "awareness" vs. "intent." In these cases, precision is less helpful than accuracy.

You want the naming convention to capture the user’s experience broadly and meaningfully—one that resonates across teams and scales with the customer journey, not one that is stalled by pedantic definitions.

The CIA Manual for Simple Sabotage

Notice how haggling over the precise wording results in sabotaging the mission.

Key takeaways

Name steps based on the user's perspective, not internal team labels.
Run vocabulary alignment sessions to ensure terms like "conversion" or "engagement" are defined consistently across teams.
Aim for accuracy, not precision, to avoid getting stuck in endless discussions about terms.
Watch for subtle sabotage when too much time is spent on semantics, as it can hinder operational progress.

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