This is Journey Management

Months, not workshops: the five levels of journey management maturity, with Esa Nettamo

Marc Stickdorn — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:29:05 +0200

Get started with Journey Management with this short introduction course. It's FREE.
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Why do so many journey management initiatives stall after the first big mapping effort? Esa Nettamo, founder of JourneyOps, has spent two and a half years running events across the Nordics and talking to hundreds of practitioners. He shares how the conversation has moved from education, to tools, to organisational buy-in, and walks through his five-level maturity model, from workshop maps to companies reorganised around journeys. We cover why tooling is only 10% of the work, how to win support with business outcomes, and what a reorg can do to an unprepared team. Find the talks and the JourneyOps Circle community at journey-ops.com.

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Links

Marc's Journey Management training: https://www.thisisjourneymanagement.com/
Marc's Journey Management software: https://www.smaply.com
Marc on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stickdorn
Marc's and Gerry's short self-paced free intro course to Journey Management: https://www.thisishcd.com/courses/introduction-to-journey-management

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Credits
Produced by This is Podcasting

Click here to watch a video of this episode.

Landscape the garden first: Journey Management at Cathay Pacific with Neil Williams

Marc Stickdorn — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 16:24:38 +0200

Get started with Journey Management with this short introduction course. It's FREE.
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What does it take to make journey management part of how a whole airline works? Neil Williams is Customer Experience Manager for Strategy and Service Design at Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong, after a first career in museums. He shares the four-level journey structure he has built, from an end-to-end atlas down to the maps working teams use every day. We talk about his gardening rule for getting teams started, why a printed map taped together from A3 sheets beats a shared link, and what cabin crew in the galley taught him about the customer experience. Plus his advice: start somewhere and adapt.

Links

https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilcwilliams/

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Links

Marc's Journey Management training: https://www.thisisjourneymanagement.com/
Marc's Journey Management software: https://www.smaply.com
Marc on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stickdorn
Marc's and Gerry's short self-paced free intro course to Journey Management: https://www.thisishcd.com/courses/introduction-to-journey-management

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Credits
Produced by This is Podcasting

Click here to watch a video of this episode.

Maps Were Always Useful: 15 Years of Journey Maps, with Itziar Pobes

Marc Stickdorn — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 11:58:35 +0200

Get started with Journey Management with this short introduction course. It's FREE.
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Were journey maps useless before journey management? Marc Stickdorn is joined by Itziar Pobes, a service designer with over 15 years of agency and in-house experience, to put that myth to rest. Itziar walks through real artefacts from her career: a sticky-note map that reframed a Barcelona City Council project, a 12-metre blueprint that became an operating model, a research map on ageing and a compact metro signage map. Together they explore how workshop, project and management maps differ, and why journey management lets designers stop waiting for briefs and start shaping strategy. Plus: Service Design Disrupted, Barcelona.

Links

https://sddisrupted.org/

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Links

Marc's Journey Management training: https://www.thisisjourneymanagement.com/
Marc's Journey Management software: https://www.smaply.com
Marc on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stickdorn
Marc's and Gerry's short self-paced free intro course to Journey Management: https://www.thisishcd.com/courses/introduction-to-journey-management

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Credits
Produced by This is Podcasting

Click here to watch a video of this episode.

Customer-Grounded, Decision-Made: Scaling Journey Management at Zurich Insurance, with Martina Francella

Marc Stickdorn — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 15:30:16 +0200

Get started with Journey Management with this short introduction course. It's FREE.
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Martina Francella joined Zurich Insurance as an intern four and a half years ago. Today she is a senior service designer at the group's corporate center in Zurich, and one of the people behind a journey management program now running in 17 countries with more than 120 active users across APAC, LATAM and EMEA.

In this episode of This is Journey Management, Marc Stickdorn asks her how it happened. The honest answer is that most of the early assumptions were wrong. The first six months were spent working out what journey management even was. Picking a taxonomy, a platform, and a shared vocabulary took a year. The three pilot countries turned into four when one joined on its own.

The turning point was a meeting with a C-level underwriter. Martina put a KPI-rich map in front of him and got back: "This is lots of useful information, but so what?" She went back with three lanes, stages, customer actions, and the documents sent to the customer, and for the first time the business could see every document going out from every ops team. They made a decision. Two weeks later, they asked to see the map again, this time with pain points and service levels. Demand for the artifact grew with the decisions it enabled.

Martina also covers how budget was unlocked in the UK through Consumer Duty compliance, why she breaks the service blueprint rules when the audience needs her to, how Zurich co-created its journey atlas with the countries, and the uncomfortable lesson of hiring senior service designers into roles that turned out to be ops work.

Her three tips for getting started:

find the receptive team with decision-making power
start small in both information and scope
put the map in front of people right away rather than polishing a draft.

Links

Martina’s family olive oil business: https://casaleselvapiana.com/
Smaply: https://www.smaply.com/
FCA Consumer Duty: https://www.smaply.com/blog/fca-consumer-duty-journey-map
This is Service Design Doing: https://www.thisisservicedesigndoing.com/

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Links

Marc's Journey Management training: https://www.thisisjourneymanagement.com/
Marc's Journey Management software: https://www.smaply.com
Marc on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stickdorn
Marc's and Gerry's short self-paced free intro course to Journey Management: https://www.thisishcd.com/courses/introduction-to-journey-management

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Credits
Produced by This is Podcasting

Click here to watch a video of this episode.

30 Years of Service Design: The Artifacts and the Stories, with Birgit Mager

Marc Stickdorn — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 12:05:50 +0200

Get started with Journey Management with this short introduction course. It's FREE.
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Birgit Mager became the world's first professor of service design in 1995. Now retired, she has been clearing out her office and finding 30 years of artifacts along the way. In this episode, she walks Marc through them: the first German book on service design, a Siemens board game designed in an Austrian ski hut, and the Lufthansa storyboards presented on 10 September 2001. Along the way, she traces the discipline from framing to expansion to business value, digitalisation and AI, and explains why she still sees service designers as behaviour architects first.

Marc is speaking at the Service Design Global Conference in Frankfurt on 29 October, where Smaply has a booth and two workshops. Details, and 10% off any SDGC26 ticket with the code SMAPLY2026, are at https://www.smaply.com/events

Links

Service Design Global Conference 2026, Frankfurt/Germany, 28-30 October 2026:
https://www.servicedesignglobalconference.com/
Service Design Network:
https://service-design-network.org/
Touchpoint – The Journey of Service Design:
https://service-design-network.org/touchpoint_journal
SDN case study library:
https://service-design-network.org/case_studies
This is Service Design Doing:
https://www.thisisservicedesigndoing.com/

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Links

Marc's Journey Management training: https://www.thisisjourneymanagement.com/
Marc's Journey Management software: https://www.smaply.com
Marc on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stickdorn
Marc's and Gerry's short self-paced free intro course to Journey Management: https://www.thisishcd.com/courses/introduction-to-journey-management

________________________________________________________________

Credits
Produced by This is Podcasting

Click here to watch a video of this episode.

Trailer: This is Journey Management

Marc Stickdorn — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:23:52 +0200

I started a podcast a few years ago, and then life happened and it stopped. I'm back, with a new one. This is Journey Management is about the few organisations that get past the one-off project and build something that lasts. Here's who's coming, and what they're going to show you.

Many organisations say they're customer-centric. They do one service design project. Some maps, some personas, a few workshops. And then it stops.

Teams have to beg for budget for the next project. Creative spaces become museums of journey maps. Projects end up as disconnected puzzle pieces.

Only a few organisations really manage to set up an operating system for customer experience. That's the whole show.

In this trailer, I introduce the first guests and what each of them is bringing:

Esa Nettamo, founder of JourneyOps, on the five levels of journey maturity, and why buying the tool first is the most expensive mistake you can make.
Neil Williams, Cathay Pacific, on bringing journey management into an airline. His rule: you don't hand people a garden, you landscape it first.
Fanny Giordano, VELUX, who is remarkably honest about getting the process wrong twice before she got it right.
Adam StJohn Lawrence, WorkPlayExperience, on facilitation, and on the language we use when designers work with management.
Adrienne Tan, co-founder and CEO of Brainmates in Sydney, on what happens when journeys meet product management, and why your backlog and your roadmap should be the same list.
Birgit Mager, the world's first professor of service design, going back through the history of this field. Including the artefacts.

Practitioners and experts, showing their work. Examples and models, not slogans. No fluff, no pitch. Just honest stories about the work.

Episodes are coming soon. Follow now to be first in line.