Many organizations have mature product development practices but immature CX and journey management capabilities. This can lead to faster feature optimization while unintentionally degrading end-to-end experiences. I recently explored how journey management, service design, and product management can work together to support continuous product improvement. Here, I’ll build on that thinking and focus specifically on how CX teams can add value to new product development, leveraging journey frameworks. Specifically, seeding journey management in the new product development process shifts the role of CX from reporting on outcomes to shaping upstream decisions about what should be built and measured.
Product organizations may collect data to measure a variety of business outcomes, such as Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), as well as experience outcomes such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). However, these metrics alone don’t always explain why outcomes are trending in a certain direction. This is where product teams can collaborate with CX to leverage journey management.
Looking Beyond Product-Level Metrics
One way this comes to life is through how teams interpret and act on customer journeys across products. For existing solutions, CX can map customer journeys across products or services that combine multiple individual products to help build alignment across product teams, moment by moment, around the outcomes they hope to achieve. From a single product lens, it may appear advantageous to streamline the customer’s journey from awareness to purchase as much as possible (measurable in time-to-purchase), however, from a multi-product journey lens, it may be more advantageous for customers to take their time considering how a custom suite of products may best fit their needs (measurable in total spend, loyalty, or Customer Lifetime Value).
Navigating Tensions Between Efficiency and Experience
This tension between efficiency and experience shows up in other areas as well: reducing call volume to customer assistance may lower costs for the business, but what results do those cost-reduction solutions have on strengthening customer relationships? Depending on the business goal at that moment, a different measurement tactic can indicate not only where changes are needed but also which kinds of changes are most advantageous. If a product team is only measuring customer service costs without accounting for churn-related costs associated with key customer experience pitfalls at specific points in the journey, they may miss an opportunity to improve the product and address both.
Bringing Journey Management Into New Product Development
While these challenges are often addressed in existing products, they become even more critical in new product development, where there is a great opportunity to address these kinds of decisions before launch to create a more intentional customer experience from the start. CX teams can start working with product teams in the product design phase to define the desired customer journey and identify outcomes that signal the success of features and experiences. They can examine how new products fit into existing customer journeys and add to the overall ecosystem strategy. This helps product teams align on the overall desired customer experience, in addition to the product’s vision, plan intentional data collection, and decide how they will use the results. This enhances the customer experience from the start and increases decision-making speed throughout post-release improvement phases. Examples of candidate metrics collected across phases of a generic journey can help illustrate how measurement strategies shift over time.
In summary, journey management reframes CX’s role: from tracking performance to actively informing what gets built and how value is measured. This shift enables product teams to ground decisions in a deep understanding of the end-to-end customer experience and design more sustainable and human solutions.
