Forgot where it starts and ends

Description

  • Delivery starts with awareness and is only done when the user retains (ideally refers), so you better have a plan for everything that leads to that point

Disproof

  • A centrally verifiable map of the complete user journey with direct responsibility assigned to every step

Consequences

  • There are myriad interactions with the user, and no single team can handle everything. Effort will either:
    • Get duplicated / move out of sync in silos, only to get lobbed over the wall for someone else to scramble on
    • Fall between responsibilities and not actually happen
  • You won’t have any idea of compound impacts and whether something is feeding through / working
    • You burn money and time on things that don’t work
  • Best case you waste weels, worst case you damage your reputation, either way you stand to lose customers and money

Causes

  • Silo’d teams with different incentives all pulling in their own directions
    • Typically a failure of organisational design
    • Can also arise due to politics and feudalism
  • The lack of anyone suitably motivated to fix it from within a given department
  • And in all cases, whenever a process only exists in people’s heads, you stand to have have as many processes as heads

Approaches

  • True Funnels represent the COMPLETE user journey. They start with how your user hears about the product, and ends up all the way past acquiring, using, getting value from it, all the way out to convincing someone else to use it
  • Write it down, agree it, and revisit it in contact with reality