Professional Journey Mapping

One of the talks I’ve given to a few teams internally at Microsoft is “PMing your career”. Mid-career is the perfect time to step back, see yourself as a ‘product,’ and start managing your career with intention and strategy. Here are 5 axioms I use as part of the frame: ➡️1. Treat your career as a Product with a strategic fit: Every high-performing professional has a unique value proposition. Regularly assess your Personal Product-Market Fit (PMF) to ensure that your strengths, skills, and how you’re positioning them align with the needs of your industry and your company. Strong careers, like great products, adapt to stay relevant and strategically fit. This helps you identify places you might need to grow too. ➡️2. Your resume is (kind-of) Product Review Document (PRD): Like a PRD highlights a product’s features, your resume should capture your top achievements and core skills. Keep it current and aligned with your goals, showcasing how your career product has evolved. ➡️3. Use feedback as your career “Customer Review”: Just as products thrive on customer feedback, your career benefits from input from mentors, peers, and leaders. Thoughtfully incorporate this feedback to stay aligned with your goals and make strategic improvements. ➡️4. Set a career Roadmap: Map out your career with a focus on strategy and clear goals. These checkpoints – skills to gain, connections to build, and roles to pursue – keep you moving toward your vision of success and position you for future opportunities. Ask others who have already taken the path what the checkpoints are. ➡️5. Embrace phases as part of your strategy: Like product lifecycles, careers have phases. In early roles, focus on mastering foundational skills; as you advance, lean into influence and decision-making; and eventually, hone discernment for opportunities. Each stage strengthens your overall career strategy. Hope this helps you today

I find career progression maps extremely effective. They answer one of the most prominent questions I get in interviews: "What does career progression look like in your org?" A well-defined career map: 1. Helps designers identify what they need to work on 2. Clearly sets expectations on career progression 3. Connects the dots between hard and soft skills 4. Sets the tone for assessing performance 5. Provides clarity and alignment I created this simple product design progression map to help you understand some of the key areas we assess when building design teams. For simplicity, it's broken down into 4 areas: - Ownership - Collaboration - Craft - Research Larger design teams sometimes break this down even further and include specifics like communication, impact, mentoring, design systems, prototyping, and so on. The map covers core career levels from Junior to Lead without going too granular on IC vs. Management pathways, as these differ greatly from one company to another. Use this map to: - Assess where you are in your journey - Find areas where you may benefit from growing - Help build your organization's design career map If you found the map useful, consider reporting ♻️ Find the link to a full Notion template you can copy for your organization in the comments below 👇 #productdesign #uxdesign #uiux

Have you heard of associative cartography? What it would look like if we visually represented an L&D team’s journey from learning delivery to performance on a map? On Episode 151 of Learning Uncut I had a fascinating conversation with Henriette Kloots and Evitha Scharloo from Interlocked. They have created maps using associative cartography to visualise the journey from learning to performance and impact. The World of L&D map creates a tangible common language that prompts more effective analysis of current position within L&D teams. The World of Impact map supports the next step as an L&D team seeks to position themselves to deliver impact in their organisational context. These maps also lay out the common challenges L&D teams face, helping team members to collectively understand their current position and determine the next steps in their journey to performance and impact. Henriette and Evitha discuss why and how these maps were created, how they use them in their work with L&D teams and what they tend to uncover. Using the map with facilitated support helps a team to ‘stop running’ and be curious about what they have to do and learn to become a business partner. I’m impressed with this innovative approach to get a team to reflect and figure out what they need to do next to improve their capability and impact. To learn more about the maps and hear key advice for L&D professionals and leaders looking to make the journey from learning delivery to performance, you can listen on your favourite podcast app or go to the episode landing page to listen and access additional resources https://lnkd.in/e-MbxFKJ  #LearningUncut #LearningAndDevelopment #WorkplaceLearning #Podcast #PerformanceConsulting #LearningStrategy

Service providers in entrepreneurship often have clients come in with an idea of the final outcome they want, but lacking some of the details around what it's gonna take to get there. That's why I love creating an actual map of the client journey - a visual guide to the process, showing benchmarks along the way. This brings clarity, avoids tangents and dead ends, and helps maintain momentum on big picture projects we're working on in their business! How do you help clients visualize your process and their success?

How many of you use Journey maps AND Storymaps in your work? Definition below. Journey maps are about understanding - they document what users currently experience, often with emotional highs and lows, pain points, and touchpoints across their entire interaction with your product or service. They're diagnostic tools to build empathy and spot problems. Story maps are about building - they organize what you're going to create, showing the backbone of user activities horizontally and slicing them vertically into releases. Patton's whole point was to keep the user's workflow visible while you prioritize and plan iterative delivery. The core difference: Journey maps look at the current state to find opportunities. Story maps organize future work to maintain coherent user flow across releases. In practice, you'd use a journey map to discover that users struggle with onboarding, then use a story map to plan how you'll build better onboarding across sprints while making sure you don't lose sight of the complete workflow. Journey maps can span multiple products and channels (they might go to your website, call support, use the app). Story maps are bounded to what your team is building.

One of the standout talks for me at UXPA Amsterdam last week was Andrew Schall’s “Building the Bridge – How to Connect Current and Future State Journey Maps.” Andrew leaned into a Wizard of Oz metaphor, where the Emerald City represents the future-state vision—and journey mapping is how your team gets there. (The next time you need to represent your diverse stakeholders, may I suggest a Tin Man, Scarecrow, Lion, and a couple of witches? 🤣 Honestly, feels like the perfect cast to represent the stakeholders we all juggle!) Here are a few things that stuck with me: 🟢 Right altitude = right alignment I often talk about levels of zoom when mapping: Macro (high-level, end-to-end journeys) vs. Micro (focused on a specific feature or interaction). Andrew frames this as Altitude and recommends working at the mid-altitude level for both current state & future state maps. It’s the sweet spot: detailed enough to drive action, high-level enough to align teams. 🟢 Journey mapping is a team sport Andrew and I share the belief that mapping is most effective when done collaboratively—because each character (yes, back to the Wizard of Oz!) brings a different perspective. 🟢 Quant + Qual = a richer map In addition to grounding the journey in qualitative insights, Andrew incorporates Experience Quality Scores (EQS)—a composite of attitudinal and behavioral data that reflects the quality of a user’s experience across both individual moments and the full journey. Scores range from -5 to 5, with zero as the baseline. (see photo) 🟢 Alignment on next steps + ownership are essential Andrew uses the MoSCoW framework (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have) to prioritize opportunities in workshops. (Link to more info in comments.) We also agree that workshops must end with concrete next steps—not just a list of ideas. As Andrew put it: “No one leaves the room until there’s commitment to do those things.” 🟢 Define success for the future state As teams envision the future state, Andrew encourages articulating clear success indicators. He uses a UX KPI canvas to help stakeholders define both attitudinal and behavioral signals of success. (see photo) I was especially excited to see how ServiceNow is operationalizing journey mapping—not as a one-off deliverable on a couple of teams, but as a strategic tool for aligning teams from understanding the problem space all the way through delivering solutions. Seems to me they’re way ahead of the curve with this way of working. Is your company also operationalizing journey mapping? I’d love to connect. I’m always on the lookout for great case studies for my course Best Practices for Journey Mapping. Want to learn more? Andrew is teaching a Persona & Journey Mapping Masterclass starting July 7—or check out his book on Amazon. (Links in comments.) #UXPA2025 #JourneyMapping #ServiceDesign #UXResearch #OperationalizingUX #ExperienceStrategy