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Introduction:
Hey there, it’s your host, Sachin Sharma, a seasoned product manager with over 10 years of experience in product management roles. I’ve had the pleasure of guiding over 1,000 aspiring product managers in their journey towards success. With this podcast, I aim to share even more valuable insights on product management to help you excel in your career. If you are looking to level up your skills and stand out from the crowd, then you are in the right place. So let’s dive into today’s episode without any further delay.
Understanding Customer Journey Mapping:
Let’s start with the basics. What is customer journey mapping? Customer journey mapping is a process of visualizing the customer’s journey with your product or your service from their initial awareness to the purchase and beyond. It involves mapping out each stage of the journey, identifying the touchpoints and interactions the customer has with the product, and understanding their emotions and needs at each stage of this journey.
Importance of Customer Journey Mapping:
Now comes the next question. Why is it important for a product manager? As a product manager, understanding the customer journey is crucial for creating products that meet customer needs and expectations. It helps you identify pain points and opportunities for improvements, and it can also inform product design, marketing, and sales strategy. For aspiring product managers, knowledge of customer journey mapping can be a valuable asset in job interviews and in making that transition to a product management role. It shows that you have a deep understanding of customer needs and behaviors, and it demonstrates your ability to think strategically about product development.
Creating Customer Journey Mapping:
So, how do you create a customer journey map? There are several steps to create a customer journey map. The first step is defining your customer persona or user personas. To know more about it, check out my previous podcast, where I discussed it in super detail. The second step here is to identify the stages of a customer journey. The third step is to map out the customer’s actions, thoughts, and emotions at each stage. The fourth point, the fourth step here is identifying pain points, opportunities, and gaps. And the fifth step here is brainstorming solutions and prioritizing the actions.
Example of a Customer Journey:
Let’s take the example of a customer journey for an online clothing store. First, we create a persona: a fashion-conscious female aged 25 to 34. The stages of this persona are awareness, consideration, purchase, and post-purchase. For each stage, we map out the actions, thoughts, and emotions. For example, in the awareness stage, she searches for clothing styles on social media and Google. In the consideration stage, she visits the website, browses products, reads reviews, and compares prices. In the purchase stage, she adds an item to the cart, enters payment information, and checks out. In the post-purchase stage, she receives email confirmation, gets package tracking details, receives the product, and leaves a review.
Identifying Pain Points and Opportunities:
Now, let’s talk about the pain points, opportunities, and gaps in this journey. Pain points can include a difficult checkout process, slow delivery, or poor product quality. Opportunities might involve upselling related products, offering promotions for repeat customers, and addressing the identified pain points. As for gaps, these could be the lack of customer support options or limited payment methods.
Tools for Customer Journey Mapping:
What tools can you use for customer journey mapping? You can start with pen and paper or a whiteboard, which is a personal favorite. Alternatively, you can use Post-it notes and markers. There are also online tools like Canva, Lucidchart, and Miro that can be helpful.
Common Mistakes to Avoid:
Finally, let’s talk about some common mistakes to avoid when doing customer journey mapping. Some mistakes that people commonly make include focusing too much on the product and not enough on customer needs and emotions, not involving cross-functional teams or stakeholders in the process, making assumptions about customer behavior without validating them with data, and not updating the journey map as the customer’s needs evolve.
Conclusion:
And that’s a wrap for today’s podcast. I hope you enjoyed it and learned a lot about customer journey mapping. Before you go, I want to remind you that you can be a part of my community by joining my upcoming free training on Catchupwithsachn.com/saw-live. Take action and let me help you even more in my community. For those of you who are already part of my community and making progress, I highly recommend upgrading to the Diamond membership. This will give you the opportunity to upgrade your product management skills, fast-track your progress, and surround yourself with like-minded achievers and action-takers. Don’t miss out on this amazing opportunity to take your career to the next level.
Thank you.
