Case Study: Customer Journey Map - follow up story

Adding operating principles

What happened after writing a recent Product Management IRL article? These insights are for premium subscribers to Product Management IRL.

This week’s backstory is about using your customer journey map:

Customer Journey Map Case Study

What Prompted this Article?

My product’s CX lead glanced at my requirements summary and said, “These requirements do not change the service design.”

What? The requirements are for a change in quoting and pricing of my service. How can a change in the quoting process not affect the service design?

After more discussion, I realized I never required operating principles in the service design. Sales and delivery were negotiating operating principles for every customer.

This meant the set-up fees and expansion fees were different for every customer. This is bad news for a service business that needs to grow—it is inefficient to negotiate unique terms for each customer.

I summarized the benefits of operating principles:

• Operating principles empower independent work: teams operate in the same context in terms of customer milestones, expansions, and business risks

• Relationships matter: documented principles provide a stable foundation for teams to work together

• Controlled customization is best: optimize subject matter expert time by escalating special requests to them

I worked on the operating principles after publishing this article.

What Happened After this Article?