Create a comprehensive customer journey map that visualizes how customers interact with your brand across all stages—from awareness to loyalty—documenting their actions, touchpoints, emotions, KPIs, business goals, and teams involved at each stage. Use this to identify pain points, align cross-functional teams, and systematically improve the customer experience to achieve business objectives.
This is not a user flow diagram—it's a strategic artifact that combines customer empathy with business metrics to drive actionable improvements.
Adapted from NNGroup's framework and Carnegie Mellon's PM curriculum, a customer journey map documents:
Horizontal structure (stages):
Vertical structure (for each stage):
Use template.md for the full fill-in structure.
Before mapping, ensure you have:
skills/proto-persona/SKILL.md)If missing: Run discovery interviews, persona definition work, or touchpoint audits first.
Define what you want to achieve:
## Objectives
- [Goal 1: e.g., "Identify top 3 pain points causing drop-off between Awareness and Consideration"]
- [Goal 2: e.g., "Align marketing and sales on customer motivations at each stage"]
- [Goal 3: e.g., "Understand emotional journey to inform messaging strategy"]
Quality checks:
Select one persona to focus on (create separate maps for each persona):
## Persona
- [Persona name and brief description]
- [Example: "Manager Mike: 35-42, Director of Product at mid-sized B2B SaaS, struggles with data-driven prioritization, values time savings over feature depth"]
Why one persona per map: Different personas have different journeys. Mixing them creates confusion.
For each stage (Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Service, Loyalty), document:
What customers do at this stage:
### Stage: [Stage Name, e.g., Awareness]
**Customer Actions:**
- [Action 1: e.g., "See LinkedIn ad about product management tools"]
- [Action 2: e.g., "Hear about tool from PM peer at conference"]
- [Action 3: e.g., "Google 'best product roadmap software'"]
Quality checks:
Where/how customers interact with your brand:
**Touchpoints:**
- [Touchpoint 1: e.g., "LinkedIn Ads"]
- [Touchpoint 2: e.g., "Word-of-mouth at PM conferences"]
- [Touchpoint 3: e.g., "Google organic search results"]
- [Touchpoint 4: e.g., "Review sites (G2, Capterra)"]
Quality checks:
Emotions and thoughts customers have:
**Customer Experience:**
- [Emotion 1: e.g., "Curious but skeptical—'Is this actually better than spreadsheets?'"]
- [Emotion 2: e.g., "Overwhelmed by options—'Too many tools, how do I choose?'"]
- [Emotion 3: e.g., "Hopeful but cautious—'Could this save me time?'"]
Quality checks:
Key performance indicators for this stage:
**KPIs:**
- [KPI 1: e.g., "Brand awareness (measured via surveys)"]
- [KPI 2: e.g., "LinkedIn ad impressions: 100k/month"]
- [KPI 3: e.g., "Organic search traffic: 5k visitors/month"]
- [KPI 4: e.g., "G2 review views: 2k/month"]
Quality checks:
What you're trying to achieve at this stage:
**Business Goals:**
- [Goal 1: e.g., "Increase brand awareness among PMs at B2B SaaS companies"]
- [Goal 2: e.g., "Generate 500 qualified leads/month"]
- [Goal 3: e.g., "Position as top 3 roadmap tool in G2 rankings"]
Quality checks:
Who owns this stage:
**Teams Involved:**
- [Team 1: e.g., "Marketing (ad campaigns, SEO)"]
- [Team 2: e.g., "Content (blog posts, comparison guides)"]
- [Team 3: e.g., "Customer Success (case studies, testimonials)"]
Quality checks:
Create a table or visual diagram:
| Stage | Awareness | Consideration | Decision | Service | Loyalty |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Customer Actions | See ad, hear from peers, Google search | Compare features, read reviews, request demo | Free trial signup, test with real data, evaluate ROI | Onboard team, build first roadmap, integrate with Jira | Use daily, recommend to peers, share wins on LinkedIn |
| Touchpoints | LinkedIn Ads, conferences, Google, review sites | Website, demo calls, sales emails | Product (free trial), onboarding emails | Product, support chat, knowledge base | Product, community forums, customer success check-ins |
| Customer Experience | Curious but skeptical | Excited but overwhelmed by options | Anxious about setup time, hopeful about time savings | Relieved if easy, frustrated if complex | Satisfied and confident, proud of wins |
| KPIs | Impressions: 100k/month, traffic: 5k/month | Demo requests: 100/month, trial signups: 50/month | Conversion rate: 20%, time-to-value: <2 hours | Activation rate: 70%, support ticket volume | Retention rate: 85%, NPS: 50, referral rate: 15% |
| Business Goals | Increase brand awareness, generate 500 leads/month | Improve lead quality, reduce sales cycle to 30 days | Increase trial-to-paid conversion, optimize onboarding | Reduce churn, improve activation, minimize support costs | Increase LTV, generate referrals, upsell premium features |
| Teams Involved | Marketing, Content | Marketing, Sales, Product | Sales, Product, Onboarding | Product, Support, Customer Success | Product, Customer Success, Marketing |
Review the map and ask:
Prioritization criteria:
See examples/sample.md for a full customer journey map example.
See examples/meta-product-manager-skills.md for a meta dogfooding example mapping this repository's own customer journey.
Mini example excerpt:
| **Stage** | **Awareness** | **Consideration** | **Decision** |
| **Customer Actions** | Sees LinkedIn ad | Compares on G2 | Starts free trial |
| **Customer Experience** | Curious but skeptical | Overwhelmed | Anxious about setup |
Symptom: "Customer feels happy" or "Customer is satisfied"
Consequence: No insight into why they feel that way or what to improve.
Fix: Be specific: "Relieved that setup took 30 minutes, not 3 hours as feared."
Symptom: Only documenting digital touchpoints (website, app)
Consequence: Miss offline interactions (conferences, word-of-mouth, support calls).
Fix: Include all touchpoints: physical, digital, human, and automated.
Symptom: Mapping what you want customers to do, not what they actually do
Consequence: Journey map reflects wishful thinking, not reality.
Fix: Validate with customer research, analytics, and support tickets.
Symptom: Journey map has actions and emotions but no metrics or business objectives
Consequence: No way to measure success or prioritize improvements.
Fix: Add KPIs and business goals for each stage. Make them measurable.
Symptom: Journey map created once, never updated
Consequence: Map becomes outdated as customer behavior evolves.
Fix: Review quarterly. Update based on new data, product changes, or market shifts.
skills/proto-persona/SKILL.md — Defines the persona for the journey mapskills/jobs-to-be-done/SKILL.md — Informs customer actions and goalsskills/problem-statement/SKILL.md — Identifies pain points at each stageskills/user-story-mapping/SKILL.md — Complementary (story mapping focuses on product usage, journey mapping covers all touchpoints)prompts/customer-journey-mapping-prompt-template.md in the https://github.com/deanpeters/product-manager-prompts repo.Skill type: Component
Suggested filename: customer-journey-map.md
Suggested placement: /skills/components/
Dependencies: References skills/proto-persona/SKILL.md, skills/jobs-to-be-done/SKILL.md, skills/problem-statement/SKILL.md