How to scale user understanding across your organization without becoming a bottleneck
We’ve all been there. You spend weeks crafting this beautiful journey map, complete with emotional highs and lows, touchpoints, and pain points. Everyone loves it during the presentation. But then what happens? After three months, the map is buried somewhere in your team’s folders, while your product partners never quite figured out how to use it to make decisions, to drive their roadmap, or to keep it updated with new insights and changes.
The question isn’t whether we need better journey maps. It’s whether we need to evolve from mapping to managing.
Jamin Hegeman (my former design VP at Capital One, now at Harmonic Design) uses the analogy of conducting a symphony to define journey management:
“It’s about bringing disparate instruments into harmony, balancing nuance and dynamics, and shaping the entire experience in real time, from the first note to the last. Journey management asks the same of us.”
It’s about building systems that actually help us continuously improve the customer experience.
While the journey map is at the heart of the practice, successful journey management requires what Hegeman calls a “journey management stack”—an integrated infrastructure that keeps journey work alive as strategic tools rather than artifacts. This requires both the input of quantitative data (e.g usage, conversion, NPS) and qualitative insight (e.g interviews, feedback, ethnographic research) to signal how well the journeys are performing against target metrics.
This is where UX researchers can make magic happen: by not only owning journey data and metrics, but by helping build the systems to make them visible (and actionable!) to product and business teams. These systems enable organization-wide user empathy and can serve as the foundation of product health. When we move from simply delivering insights to building the infrastructure for user understanding, it becomes easier to gain a seat at the strategic table.
Building Your Journey Management Stack at Scale
The problem of a static journey map becomes acute at scale. Most larger companies aren’t dealing with one journey. They have multiple products, dozens of flows, competing team goals, and stakeholders asking, "How do we know if we're winning?"
The challenge is to build systems that allow different product journeys to be compared and that add up to meaningful organizational insights. The most effective implementations share several key components:
Get Your Metrics Straight (And Keep Them Simple): Instead of every team creating their own version of "Are users happy?", establish consistent experience metrics that work across all products. You need that universal layer so executives can assess portfolio health, while teams can still track their specific Jobs-to-be-Done metrics. The sweet spot is comprehensive enough to be useful, simple enough that people actually use it.
Someone Needs to Own the Big Picture: Create clear ownership where one team or person maintains the ecosystem-wide journey view (the hub) while product teams focus on their specific areas (the spokes). Without ensuring someone always has a view of the holistic experience, you risk fragmented insights that don’t add up to organizational learning.
Make the Data Work for You: Build infrastructure that surfaces insights automatically rather than creating more manual analysis work. This means dashboards that executives and product managers actually look at, plus automated alerts when journey health degrades. The goal is intelligence that bubbles up, not reports that pile up.
Create Actual Processes That Stick: Establish regular review cycles, clear handoffs, and governance that keeps the system healthy over time. Without this operational layer, even the most brilliant system gradually falls apart as priorities shift and people move on.
These four components create a self-reinforcing system: consistent measurement generates comparable insights, clear ownership ensures someone acts on them, accessible infrastructure enables widespread adoption, and regular processes keep everything current and relevant.
What Figma Did (and Why it Works)
Rie McGwier from Figma’s Research team explained to me how Figma has distilled its measurement approach to three core signals that work across all their product surfaces, including Figma Design, FigJam, Figma Slides, Figma Make, Figma Sites, Figma Buzz, and Dev Mode: product sentiment, product-market fit, and initial impressions. While each product has specific JTBD metrics, a universal layer enables easier comparability.
- Product Sentiment captures efficiency, or how effective the product is at unblocking users on a 1-5 scale.
- Product-Market Fit asks how disappointed users would be if they could no longer use the product. The metric determines whether users would be disappointed to lose access.
- Initial Impressions measures how well the experience matches user expectations early in their journey with bipolar Likert scales. Timing is crucial: for a robust B2B enterprise tool, users need time to understand what they’re experiencing, so it’s important to target users who have had enough time to form opinions but are still in their onboarding journey.
What makes this approach powerful is pairing quantitative consistency with qualitative depth. Each metric includes both a standardized scale and open-ended follow-up questions. When experiences exceed expectations, they ask what specifically exceeded them. When they fall short, they dig into why.
This creates what McGwier calls “that one-two punch of the metric plus the open-ended deep dive.”
Figma is using AI to analyze those open-ended responses at scale, tracking themes over time to see if product improvements actually solve the problems users talk about.
“We take our open-ended data, we map them into themes, we map the percentage of themes over time,” McGwier explained.
This is qualitative research at scale, and it's exactly the kind of infrastructure thinking that makes journey management work.
Journey Management in Practice: Actionable for Every Stakeholder
The real test of journey management isn't whether it looks good in a presentation; it's whether it seamlessly integrates into how product decisions actually get made. The most effective systems don't just provide data; they enable everyone to understand and genuinely own the customer experience.
Here's what success looks like when different stakeholders can get what they need:
Product Managers get their evidence game strong. Five-minute dashboard visits that provide solid backing for PRDs and help them size opportunities for new features. No more “we think users want this” presentations. Now it's “here's exactly what users are telling us.”
Researchers get to do what they're best at: using the quantitative foundation to triangulate with qualitative insights and identify exactly where to dig deeper. Instead of starting from scratch every time, they can build on a rich foundation of ongoing user intelligence.
Executives can see the forest and the trees: portfolio-wide views with clear health indicators and the ability to drill down when something's off.
Everyone becomes fluent in user themes that cut across product boundaries, plus they have real user data informing quarterly planning instead of just business metrics and gut feelings.
Treating the System like a Product
Perhaps the most sophisticated aspect of mature journey management is treating the system itself as a product. As McGwier puts it:
“This data product has its own journey. How effectively is it doing its job? Where it’s not effectively doing it, what might I need to do to improve that?”
This meta-approach—continuously improving your capability to measure and act on user journeys—represents what Jamin Hegeman would call a fully mature journey management stack. You’re not just measuring user journeys; you’re evolving your organizational capacity to understand and respond to user needs.
Next Key Skillset
For UX researchers feeling stuck between high demand for insights and limited resources, journey management offers a new path. Instead of being the "study person," you become the infrastructure builder who enables systematic user empathy across the whole organization.
Working with design and research operations, you can focus on building measurement systems that enable ongoing user understanding rather than just delivering individual studies. This means:
- Establishing consistent metrics that work across products
- Enabling product managers to check user health as easily as they check business metrics
- Making user insights as accessible as any other data source.
Your next career evolution might not be learning a new research method; it could be learning to scale the methods you already know. In a world where user understanding needs to happen continuously rather than periodically, the researchers who build infrastructure will have far more impact.
What's your experience with journey management systems? Have you found ways to move beyond static mapping in your organization? I'd love to hear your thoughts and challenges in the comments below.