Don’t Forget the Source Material: Why Journeys Still Matter in Product Planning

Every company loves to say they’re customer-centric. It’s a badge on the slide deck and a tagline in the brand campaign. But when the pressure is on, product teams too often toss aside the very source material that should guide them: the journeys.

I’ve walked into more than one organization and found either no journeys at all, or carefully crafted maps tucked away and forgotten. In some cases, I’ve even asked to create them and been told there wasn’t funding for that work. But at what cost?

Skipping journeys always looks like a savings in the moment, yet it ends up far more expensive to navigate without them. It’s like someone taped over the mixtape that held the whole soundtrack together. In the rush to patch today’s problem, the blueprint gets ignored, and the result is predictable: fixes that feel satisfying now but collapse when tomorrow’s needs arrive.

What We Mean by “Source Material”

When I talk about journeys, I don’t just mean the tidy little customer click path you see in a product deck. Those flows have their place, but they’re only one frame of the film. Real journeys stretch across the entire ecosystem: the customer calling support because a self-service flow broke, the service agent juggling three systems while trying to sound calm, the back-office processor reconciling mismatched records, the field technician rolling a truck on overtime, the ERP or delivery platform straining to make sense of it all. That’s the story, beginning to end.

Now, why does this matter? Because if you only design for one character in that cast, you miss the plot twist. I’ve seen teams get laser-focused on a customer-facing feature, only to learn that it unintentionally doubled the workload for the people in the background, the folks who actually make the experience real. Think of it like watching The Empire Strikes Back but only following Luke. You’d miss the fact that Han’s frozen in carbonite and the whole galaxy is shifting under the surface.

Journeys capture those side plots. They show the friction points that aren’t visible from a customer survey or an analytics dashboard. They reveal where a single quick fix can ripple downstream and create chaos in places the product team never thought to look. That’s why journeys are not decorative. They’re not the pretty poster you hang up at a design sprint. They’re the blueprint for scale.

Without them, teams are building blind. And when you build blind, you get stuck on repeat, solving the same problems over and over because the original source material was never on the table.

The Pattern of Forgetting

Here’s the cycle I see again and again. An urgent business issue pops up. Leadership wants a fast solution. Teams rush into sprint mode. And if journeys exist, they’re dismissed as “old” or “theoretical” while everyone races to patch the problem. The source material gets left behind.

It sounds efficient, but what usually happens is the opposite. When you don’t ground your work in the end-to-end story, you’re basically taping over the original mixtape with a radio single. It might feel good for a minute, but you’ve lost the context that made the whole album work.

At one company, a consultant had delivered gorgeous end-to-end journey maps six months before I arrived. They were printed, mounted, and even paraded around at an all-hands. By the time I joined, the PDFs were buried in Confluence. Product teams were tackling issues like duplicate calls to customer service, problems that were already mapped and diagnosed in those journeys. Instead of building from the blueprint, they were reinventing the wheel.

The result? A carousel of band-aids and rework. Nobody was malicious or lazy, but by ignoring the source material, spinning their wheels on the same issue. This isn’t rare. Research shows that organizations who skip or sideline journey mapping spend more time in rework and misaligned priorities, while the maps themselves too often get treated as “one-and-done artifacts” instead of living tools.

The Cost of Skipping Journeys

When journeys get sidelined, the real damage isn’t just in duplicate effort. It’s in the way teams slowly erode trust, burn resources, and set themselves up for brittle solutions that don’t scale.

I remember hearing about some product leadership being under pressure to improve delivery times. The team rushed to add a scheduling feature to the customer app. On paper, it looked like a win. But nobody traced the impact across warehouse staff, drivers, or the ERP system that handled routing. The new feature overloaded an already fragile backend and triggered a cascade of manual workarounds. Delivery times actually got worse, and the “fix” cost more to unwind than it did to build.

The real opportunity wasn’t to send more trucks. It was to modernize intake with AI-driven triage. By automating how service calls were classified and cross-referencing them with network data in real time, the company could cut unnecessary dispatches, free up technicians for the jobs that mattered, and lower costs. Journeys made that clear. They showed that the smarter move was to automate a manual process, not double down on it.

This is the trap of skipping journeys. Without that blueprint, teams design in a vacuum. They optimize for one touchpoint while unknowingly breaking another. The result is what Forrester calls “fragmented experiences,” solutions that look fine in isolation but collapse under scale.

Beyond the technical fallout, there’s a cultural one. When journeys are treated as disposable, design gets reduced to decoration. Engineers tune out, product managers roll their eyes, and leadership wonders why features never deliver the expected ROI. As McKinsey’s research on customer journeys shows, companies that ground planning in journeys not only build smoother products, they outperform peers on both customer satisfaction and cost-to-serve.

Skipping journeys isn’t just a misstep. It’s a tax on the future.

What Good Looks Like

The flip side is what happens when teams keep journeys alive. The difference is night and day. Suddenly, features aren’t evaluated in isolation. They’re traced through the ecosystem, tested against real workflows, and prioritized for scale instead of just speed.

In one planning session, a request came up to add a chatbot for customer service. On the surface, it seemed like a quick way to deflect call volume. Instead of rushing to build, we tested it against the journey. We mapped the customer’s path, the agent’s workflow, and the back-office systems. What we found was simple: the problem wasn’t agent capacity at all. It was fragmented billing data scattered across three systems.

Fixing that backend issue sped up agents, reduced customer complaints, and made the chatbot unnecessary. The company saved budget and avoided distracting itself with a shiny new tool. More importantly, the decision built confidence across teams because everyone could see how the choice aligned with the bigger picture.

This isn’t just anecdotal. Research shows that organizations who integrate journey mapping into planning are more likely to deliver measurable ROI on customer experience initiatives and outperform peers in both satisfaction and efficiency (McKinsey). Journeys aren’t artifacts you make once and shelve. They’re living source material. When they’re used in planning, they cut through noise, surface the real problems, and keep the team building toward tomorrow instead of patching for today.

Practical Takeaways

So how do you make sure journeys don’t end up as wall art or a forgotten Confluence file? Treat them as source material, not side projects. Here are a few ways to do it:

• Audit your journeys. Do they even exist? If not, start creating them. If they do exist, are they accessible, updated, and being used in planning sessions?
  
  
  

• Keep them in circulation. Don’t treat journey maps as a one-time deliverable. Revisit them during PI planning, backlog refinement, or feature kickoffs. Put them on the table when trade-offs are being debated.
  
  
  

• Make them multi-stakeholder. A customer journey is only part of the story. Map how changes affect agents, back-office processors, field workers, and systems. The best journeys reveal dependencies across the entire ecosystem.
  
  
  

• Tie them to outcomes. Use journeys to show not just the pain points but the business impact. This is how you shift them from “design artifacts” to “strategic tools” (NN/g).
  
  
  

• Refresh regularly. Journeys get stale. New features, new policies, new tech stacks all change the flows. Treat them like living documents that evolve with the product.

Iteration without source material is just recycling bad habits. Innovation comes when you design against the full journey and keep that story alive in every planning cycle.

Journeys are the foundation. Forget them and you’re building on sand. Every quick fix that ignores the bigger story is a bet against your future, and eventually the bill always comes due. The smartest organizations don’t wait for that moment. They keep journeys alive, and in doing so, they build products that scale, teams that align, and customer experiences that actually work.

This isn’t just design housekeeping. It’s leadership. Treating journeys as source material signals to your teams that you value clarity over chaos, and that you’re investing in solutions that last. It’s how companies escape the cycle of rework and start compounding progress instead of repeating the same mistakes.

If you want your product teams to move faster without running in circles, start with journeys. Put them back on the table, refresh them often, and use them to guide decisions at every level. That’s how iteration becomes innovation.

And if your company needs a partner to help make that shift, I run UX audits and facilitate journey-mapping sessions that reconnect teams to their source material. Together we can cut through the noise, find the patterns that matter, and build a foundation for growth. You can reach me here: chuckgriffithdesign.com/contact.