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This is Journey Management
This is Journey Management episodes
- Months, not workshops: the five levels of journey management maturity, with Esa Nettamo
Get started with Journey Management with this short introduction course. It's FREE.
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Why do so many journey management initiatives stall after the first big mapping effort? Esa Nettamo, founder of JourneyOps, has spent two and a half years running events across the Nordics and talking to hundreds of practitioners. He shares how the conversation has moved from education, to tools, to organisational buy-in, and walks through his five-level maturity model, from workshop maps to companies reorganised around journeys. We cover why tooling is only 10% of the work, how to win support with business outcomes, and what a reorg can do to an unprepared team. Find the talks and the JourneyOps Circle community at journey-ops.com.
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Links
- Marc's Journey Management training: https://www.thisisjourneymanagement.com/
- Marc's Journey Management software: https://www.smaply.com
- Marc on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stickdorn
- Marc's and Gerry's short self-paced free intro course to Journey Management: https://www.thisishcd.com/courses/introduction-to-journey-management
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Credits
Click here to watch a video of this episode.
Produced by This is Podcasting45 min - Landscape the garden first: Journey Management at Cathay Pacific with Neil Williams
Get started with Journey Management with this short introduction course. It's FREE.
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What does it take to make journey management part of how a whole airline works? Neil Williams is Customer Experience Manager for Strategy and Service Design at Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong, after a first career in museums. He shares the four-level journey structure he has built, from an end-to-end atlas down to the maps working teams use every day. We talk about his gardening rule for getting teams started, why a printed map taped together from A3 sheets beats a shared link, and what cabin crew in the galley taught him about the customer experience. Plus his advice: start somewhere and adapt.
Linkshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/neilcwilliams/
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Links
- Marc's Journey Management training: https://www.thisisjourneymanagement.com/
- Marc's Journey Management software: https://www.smaply.com
- Marc on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stickdorn
- Marc's and Gerry's short self-paced free intro course to Journey Management: https://www.thisishcd.com/courses/introduction-to-journey-management
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Credits
Click here to watch a video of this episode.
Produced by This is Podcasting42 min - Maps Were Always Useful: 15 Years of Journey Maps, with Itziar Pobes
Get started with Journey Management with this short introduction course. It's FREE.
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Were journey maps useless before journey management? Marc Stickdorn is joined by Itziar Pobes, a service designer with over 15 years of agency and in-house experience, to put that myth to rest. Itziar walks through real artefacts from her career: a sticky-note map that reframed a Barcelona City Council project, a 12-metre blueprint that became an operating model, a research map on ageing and a compact metro signage map. Together they explore how workshop, project and management maps differ, and why journey management lets designers stop waiting for briefs and start shaping strategy. Plus: Service Design Disrupted, Barcelona.Links
- https://sddisrupted.org/
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Links
- Marc's Journey Management training: https://www.thisisjourneymanagement.com/
- Marc's Journey Management software: https://www.smaply.com
- Marc on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stickdorn
- Marc's and Gerry's short self-paced free intro course to Journey Management: https://www.thisishcd.com/courses/introduction-to-journey-management
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Credits
Click here to watch a video of this episode.
Produced by This is Podcasting55 min - Customer-Grounded, Decision-Made: Scaling Journey Management at Zurich Insurance, with Martina Francella
Get started with Journey Management with this short introduction course. It's FREE.
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Martina Francella joined Zurich Insurance as an intern four and a half years ago. Today she is a senior service designer at the group's corporate center in Zurich, and one of the people behind a journey management program now running in 17 countries with more than 120 active users across APAC, LATAM and EMEA.In this episode of This is Journey Management, Marc Stickdorn asks her how it happened. The honest answer is that most of the early assumptions were wrong. The first six months were spent working out what journey management even was. Picking a taxonomy, a platform, and a shared vocabulary took a year. The three pilot countries turned into four when one joined on its own.
The turning point was a meeting with a C-level underwriter. Martina put a KPI-rich map in front of him and got back: "This is lots of useful information, but so what?" She went back with three lanes, stages, customer actions, and the documents sent to the customer, and for the first time the business could see every document going out from every ops team. They made a decision. Two weeks later, they asked to see the map again, this time with pain points and service levels. Demand for the artifact grew with the decisions it enabled.
Martina also covers how budget was unlocked in the UK through Consumer Duty compliance, why she breaks the service blueprint rules when the audience needs her to, how Zurich co-created its journey atlas with the countries, and the uncomfortable lesson of hiring senior service designers into roles that turned out to be ops work.
Her three tips for getting started:
- find the receptive team with decision-making power
- start small in both information and scope
- put the map in front of people right away rather than polishing a draft.
Links
- Martina’s family olive oil business: https://casaleselvapiana.com/
- Smaply: https://www.smaply.com/
- FCA Consumer Duty: https://www.smaply.com/blog/fca-consumer-duty-journey-map
- This is Service Design Doing: https://www.thisisservicedesigndoing.com/
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Links
- Marc's Journey Management training: https://www.thisisjourneymanagement.com/
- Marc's Journey Management software: https://www.smaply.com
- Marc on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stickdorn
- Marc's and Gerry's short self-paced free intro course to Journey Management: https://www.thisishcd.com/courses/introduction-to-journey-management
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Credits
Click here to watch a video of this episode.
Produced by This is Podcasting42 min - 30 Years of Service Design: The Artifacts and the Stories, with Birgit Mager
Get started with Journey Management with this short introduction course. It's FREE.
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Birgit Mager became the world's first professor of service design in 1995. Now retired, she has been clearing out her office and finding 30 years of artifacts along the way. In this episode, she walks Marc through them: the first German book on service design, a Siemens board game designed in an Austrian ski hut, and the Lufthansa storyboards presented on 10 September 2001. Along the way, she traces the discipline from framing to expansion to business value, digitalisation and AI, and explains why she still sees service designers as behaviour architects first.Marc is speaking at the Service Design Global Conference in Frankfurt on 29 October, where Smaply has a booth and two workshops. Details, and 10% off any SDGC26 ticket with the code SMAPLY2026, are at https://www.smaply.com/events
Links
- Service Design Global Conference 2026, Frankfurt/Germany, 28-30 October 2026:
https://www.servicedesignglobalconference.com/ - Service Design Network:
https://service-design-network.org/ - Touchpoint – The Journey of Service Design:
https://service-design-network.org/touchpoint_journal - SDN case study library:
https://service-design-network.org/case_studies - This is Service Design Doing:
https://www.thisisservicedesigndoing.com/
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Links
- Marc's Journey Management training: https://www.thisisjourneymanagement.com/
- Marc's Journey Management software: https://www.smaply.com
- Marc on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stickdorn
- Marc's and Gerry's short self-paced free intro course to Journey Management: https://www.thisishcd.com/courses/introduction-to-journey-management
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Credits
Click here to watch a video of this episode.
Produced by This is Podcasting39 min - Service Design Global Conference 2026, Frankfurt/Germany, 28-30 October 2026:
- Trailer: This is Journey Management
I started a podcast a few years ago, and then life happened and it stopped. I'm back, with a new one. This is Journey Management is about the few organisations that get past the one-off project and build something that lasts. Here's who's coming, and what they're going to show you.
Many organisations say they're customer-centric. They do one service design project. Some maps, some personas, a few workshops. And then it stops.
Teams have to beg for budget for the next project. Creative spaces become museums of journey maps. Projects end up as disconnected puzzle pieces.
Only a few organisations really manage to set up an operating system for customer experience. That's the whole show.
In this trailer, I introduce the first guests and what each of them is bringing:
- Esa Nettamo, founder of JourneyOps, on the five levels of journey maturity, and why buying the tool first is the most expensive mistake you can make.
- Neil Williams, Cathay Pacific, on bringing journey management into an airline. His rule: you don't hand people a garden, you landscape it first.
- Fanny Giordano, VELUX, who is remarkably honest about getting the process wrong twice before she got it right.
- Adam StJohn Lawrence, WorkPlayExperience, on facilitation, and on the language we use when designers work with management.
- Adrienne Tan, co-founder and CEO of Brainmates in Sydney, on what happens when journeys meet product management, and why your backlog and your roadmap should be the same list.
- Birgit Mager, the world's first professor of service design, going back through the history of this field. Including the artefacts.
Practitioners and experts, showing their work. Examples and models, not slogans. No fluff, no pitch. Just honest stories about the work.
Episodes are coming soon. Follow now to be first in line.
3 min
About This is Journey Management
From the publisher's feed
Journey management is the organisational operating system for customer experience. Based on dynamic, interlinked journey maps at different zoom levels, it connects organisational silos from a customer's perspective. Journey Management connects qualitative research data with live quantitative metrics, pain points, opportunities, and projects, and serves as an information system for customer-centric decision-making. The podcast explores how this works across different organisations and highlights aspects that inspire us as we scale service design through Journey Management.
Hosted by Marc Stickdorn, CEO of Smaply and co-author of This is Service Design Thinking and This is Service Design Doing, This is Journey Management goes deep into customer experience (CX), customer journey mapping, service design, journey orchestration, and customer-centric transformation.
Each episode, Marc sits down with the practitioners doing this work for real and those who inspire us: CX and experience leaders inside large enterprises, service designers and journey managers building the practice from scratch, and transformation executives turning customer journeys into business decisions. No fluff, no pitches. Just honest stories of our work.
New episodes every two weeks. Follow the show to make this your destination for everything journey management.