Smaply

Personas don't fail loudly. They drift. The research was solid the day you did it. Then the market moved, the product changed, and the people you interviewed stopped representing your actual users. Nobody noticed, because a stale persona still looks authoritative. The fix isn't rebuilding from scratch every year. It's a review rhythm, a few event triggers, and personas that stay connected to the journey maps they inform, so an update ripples through instead of orphaning everything downstream. We wrote about how to keep personas current without the annual panic project. Link in the comments

Looking to learn more about journey management this year? Join Marc Stickdorn in person in Singapore on July 27-28: two days on turning journey maps from a workshop output into a system your organization runs on. Map hierarchy, connected research, maps tied to KPIs, and governance across teams. Marc is also speaking at the INTERSECTIONS conference that week, July 23-24. Not able to travel? The same deep dive runs online on September 22-24 and again on November 17-19, each timed for a different set of regions. Registration links in the comments.

Most teams set price in one room and map the customer journey in another. But the moments that shape what a customer expects to pay are already sitting on the journey: the brand they first encounter, the proof points on a product page, the way options are packaged at checkout. Seen together as a pricing layer on the journey map, those moments show you where the experience is building value and where it is quietly pushing people toward the cheapest option. This one is a guest piece from Ann Padley of Untapped Pricing, co-author of The Pricing Sprint. She breaks down the pricing signals to look for at each stage, and how to review them with strategy, research, and a few small experiments, no price change required. https://lnkd.in/dyWRqmYw

Most CX programs are organized around metrics and touchpoints. A dashboard of scores leadership checks each month, and a folder of journey maps nobody has reopened since the workshop. The effort is real. The end-to-end experience still frays, because nothing connects the score that dropped to the moment that caused it or the person who can fix it. Journey-led CX changes the unit you manage. The journey becomes the thing you plan around, measure, and improve, not a picture you make once and archive. We wrote about what that looks like in practice. Link in the comments

Service design, UX, and design thinking get used as if they were the same thing. They show up in the same job ads, the same team names, the same meetings. They answer different questions. Design thinking is how you frame the problem. UX shapes a single product. Service design orchestrates the whole service across every touchpoint. We wrote a guide that untangles all three, with a side-by-side comparison and a simple rule for which one a given problem actually needs. Link in the comments #ServiceDesign #UXResearch

More than 340 people registered for our webinar, Journey Management: From Visualisations to Operating Systems. Thank you to everyone who joined. The full recording is now available, so if you missed it or want to revisit a section, you can. Marc Stickdorn was joined by Katrine Ly and Kasper Greve from DAY21 and Fanny Giordano from VELUX on how teams move from static maps to running the customer experience as an operating system. Watch the recording: https://lnkd.in/dBZWeUAq

Most service design writing stops at definitions and principles. Teams who need to actually do the work walk away with vocabulary but no shape for what to do on Monday morning. Our new pillar guide takes it further. It covers the artifacts service designers actually produce, the process end to end, how to measure impact, and what it takes to keep the work alive after the engagement closes. Written for practitioners, not textbooks. Link in the comments #ServiceDesign #JourneyManagement #CustomerExperience

Journey maps are good at surfacing pain points. The hard part is deciding which ones to fix first. Without a system, decisions default to whoever argues loudest, whatever's easiest, or whatever leadership noticed last week. The result is misallocated resources and customers whose real problems go unaddressed. Three dimensions cut through the noise: customer impact, business value, and effort. Score each finding 1-5 on all three. Rank by total. Plot on a matrix to decide the approach. We published a scoring framework for journey prioritization. #JourneyMapping #JourneyManagement #CustomerExperience

Last chance to join our free webinar! Journey Management: From Visualisations to Operating Systems goes live tomorrow at 11am CEST. Marc Stickdorn, the team at DAY21, and Fanny Giordano from VELUX on turning journey maps into something your teams actually run on. Link to join in the comments.