journey-map

# Journey Map A customer journey map traces one persona's experience through the stages of using your product — what they do, think, and feel at each step, where they touch you, where it hurts, and where the biggest opportunity to improve sits. Done well, it converts scattered research into a shared, prioritized view of where to fix the experience. Done badly, it's a colorful grid of guesses nobody acts on. **Grounded in:** *Mapping Experiences* — Jim Kalbach: align stages, emotions, and pain points to find the biggest opportunity per stage. **Go deeper (The Product Channel):** [User Journey Map](https://sidsaladi.substack.com/p/week-13-user-journey-map) The discipline is twofold: **one persona + one scenario per map**, and **every cell traces to evidence or is flagged as an assumption.** Mixing personas or laundering guesses as fact is how journey maps become wall art. ## When to use this - You have research (interviews, support tickets, analytics funnels, session recordings, sales/CS notes) and need to see the end-to-end experience, not isolated metrics. - Users are dropping off and you don't yet know at which stage or why — you need to localize the pain before you fix it. - A cross-functional team (design, eng, support, marketing) keeps optimizing their own slice and nobody owns the whole experience. - You're entering onboarding, activation, or renewal work and want to know where the highest-leverage fix lives. - You're aligning a team early with thin data and want an ...