13 products left, but today TheyDo
Hi friend 👋,
I'm a big believer in journey mapping. I believe that the single most critical activity that product managers should be experts in is the ability to develop a user journey map. It is a reliable method of understanding users and spreading a unified viewpoint to all teams. Breaking down all of the processes and defining potential customer pain points can easily present us with a broad list of opportunities to delight the users and create a seamless journey. In the end, everyone working on a product wants to provide a frictionless experience. And when we consider what the friction is, it is not the number of clicks or pages. It is the number of user frustration and anxiety points.
With this in mind, it is surprising to see how few PMs frequently prepare journey maps. I questioned a few peers about it, and the responses were all the same: it's a lot of work. You'll need a whiteboard and possibly some other minds to keep things detailed while you're producing. It is considerably more difficult to digitize that. You can do this with design tools like Figma or even Miro, but they are not context aware. It is simply a collection of texts and images for these tools. As a result, you are unable to share the information with the other teams in a consumable way. To comprehend what it is, you must spend time with the file, zoom in and out, and so on. Today, I'm going to show you a product that can significantly increase the influence of a product manager.
Today, TheyDo is our product.
TheyDo is just a journey mapping tool, and that is all they do. In the tool, you build personas and journeys. You can invite people, and because the software is entirely focused on the journey, there are millions of features that make this process simple. It's simple to identify opportunities, problems, and solutions. The good news is that because they are aware of the context, you will see your opportunities and solutions in different lists. If the product is truly customer-centric, then all of the work that product managers and engineers undertake in terms of the product roadmap should be organized around these journeys.
I was so psyched when I found out about TheyDo. Since knowing the consumer is the bedrock of product management, and it is often challenging to translate that knowledge into tangible artifacts, it is important to have a solid basis in both. In this case, a journey map is the most effective tool. I believe it could revolutionize our approach to developing products if it were adopted as a standard among the tools we use.
We’ll talk again tomorrow.
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