27. Customer Journey Management (feat. Kim Salazar, Sr. UX Specialist at NN/g and Jochem van der Veer, CEO/Co-Founder of TheyDo)
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This is the Nielsen Norman Group UX Podcast. I'm Therese Fessenden. A common term in UX research and design is a journey. It's kind of an interesting word if you think about it, when we also have words like workflow, task flow, screen flow, and even user flow, which all indicate some sort of flow of small steps that users or customers take. But journey implies something a bit more involved, a bit larger than a series of small steps.

It suggests stages of accomplishment, enlightenment, transformation. Call it romanticizing, but if I'm honest, the term journey captures the very essence of UX work that we consider not just a brief series of clicks and taps when we design for people, but rather we consider the whole human and the broad context they're navigating. Now that's great and all, but what if you have multiple users or customers? And what if you have multiple journeys to track and iterate? How do you manage all of that?

To explore this topic, we invited our very own Kim Salazar and Joachim van der Veer. Kim is a senior UX specialist with NNG. She's our resident omnichannel UX and CX expert who's been dedicating much of her research to understanding not just the customer journey, but how teams can operationalize the work needed to manage them. We also have Joachim van der Veer,

Joachim is the CEO of TheyDo, a customer journey management platform which connects people, processes, and products, and turns them into CX opportunities. With over 10 years of experience in UX design and service design, Joachim has insights into some of the most common challenges that designers and researchers face when trying to make sense of massive quantities of research data.

In this episode, we do a little recap of what customer journeys are, then dive right in to what customer journey management is, what might hinder teams from becoming more journey-centric, and most crucially, how teams can get started being more deliberate about journey management work.

Welcome to our podcast, Yoakum and Kim. So I would love for both of you to tell us a bit about yourselves. So how did you end up working in journey management? Yeah. Hi, Therese. My name is Kim Salazar. I'm a senior UX specialist at NMG. And I'm a senior UX specialist at NMG.

My focus area was on longitudinal experience design. So I was talking a lot about how to design omni-channel journeys so that they were effortless and enjoyable. And

Over the last six, seven years where I've been teaching audiences that topic, it always came back to how do we actually do this in practice? How do we do this internally in an organization? You know, we're not built to collaborate. We're not built to work across functional groups. So...

That led me through a lot of research and time working with clients and talking to people in different organizations to learn how they were overcoming those challenges and try to help clients design operations and practices to ensure that they were successful.

investing in the journey and helping to set up their resources and teams and processes in a way that they could really actually make a difference and execute on the stuff that makes a good customer journey.

Yeah, and related to that, just for the folks who are maybe newer to user experience, when you say omni-channel journeys, in like a one-sentence definition, how would you explain that? It really is just a set of interactions that people go through to achieve a larger goal, and it happens over time. So if you're filing a claim with insurance, you might first file online, get an email, make a phone call, get a check in the mail. All those interactions together make a journey experience, and they happen immediately.

in different places. Sometimes it's on a cell phone, sometimes it's on a website, email. So that's what makes it omnichannel.

I see. So basically managing all of these different channels means a couple things. Obviously, you can have one journey on many channels, but you can also have many journeys on even more channels. So I can see how that is an increasing concern is how do we even start to manage these things? Exactly. As somebody who has been talking about journey management in abstract for several years, I

It was very nice when Yoakum and I kind of stumbled upon each other's expertise when Yoakum introduced TheyDo to me was it actually makes journey management seem tangible. You can see it. And for people who kind of understand what it is and the concept, but

It's still very undefined and there's not a lot out there and everybody's trying to figure out how do we do this within our organization. Having the tool and looking at it and saying, oh, okay, there's sort of a light bulb moment that I see with people to say that makes sense now that I see it. Now there's this tool there.

that is putting visual things around these concepts that we're talking about, it starts to kind of solidify people's understanding of what we're trying to achieve. So that's, I was really excited when I found that Jochum and his team were out there and working in the same space that I was, and that's gonna help propel this problem space forward and create solutions for everybody who's trying to tackle this challenge. - Yeah, now Jochum, could you tell us a bit about how you got into this space?

Yeah, it's always great to hear Kim share her story because my trajectory was similar, although I didn't come from research, but I came from a design background. I've been a UX practitioner myself for many years, starting small, building out little marketing websites, little applications, and then going freelance, getting bigger assignments. And then at some point found myself doing transformational work with like the Fortune 500 companies with a small team.

We got hired to do this customer-centric way of working. And we help those teams to actually embed a culture of design thinking, use journeys and the practice of service blueprinting to actually create that cross-functional alignment

And I remember that at some project, I was standing in this like major war room, right? Where the board of directors was getting the presentation of the customers who were, we did research with, and we had fantastic concepts to bring back to the business. And I realized like,

We are not doing what we are supposed to be doing. I mean, we are building a phenomenal consulting business. I mean, we are doing great revenue, profitable business, fantastic. But we go from project to project and start over again and over again and over again, sometimes even in the same business, like four or five times. And we're like,

Is this really what we're about? And we realized the customer journey, the way that Kim described it, the set of actions that a customer takes to achieve a goal can be used to organize effectively. And we thought, hey, there must be some platforms, tools, digital solutions out there to solve this. And this was pre-COVID, so Miro, Muralor, and even a thing. And there was nothing. You had journey mapping, visualization of the journeys, of the customer journeys, but

But there was nothing to even say, like, how do we go from insight to implementation? How do we collaborate? How do we know what success looks like? So we started building out something for our little agency

I was not little at the time. I was doing fine with the goal of actually expanding the work we did. And then our customer said, hmm, that's cool. Can we also have that? And can you teach us how to use it? And that's where Daydoo today actually came from. So we stumbled upon journey management and now we're actually bringing it to the world because it seems like everyone is figuring it out. Yeah, that sounds like a really kind of

insightful aha moment to basically have these conversations with clients and to see the same pattern over and over again, that the idea of a customer journey and a customer journey map, you know, this visualization of what...

steps that person might take right across many different channels. Okay. It's great to visualize one, but how can we make sense of many and are there tools? And you're right. But for the pandemic, so before 2020, not, not very many tools to really manage all of that. So I guess that's kind of my follow-up question, which would be, how would you describe or define customer journey management, like as a skill?

It's almost like a management philosophy, right? It's a decision of a company or at least a majority part of important folks at a company to say, hey, customer centricity, no brainer to us. Customer experience, we all want to be differentiating ourselves against the competition on customer experience. I think we're past that.

But how do we get there? And I think putting the emphasis on the journey, like literally putting the customer journey and like, you know, you shared there's hundreds of journeys to manage, putting them in the center and organizing around it is in a nutshell what journey management is about. And then you get into like, okay, so how do we research? How do we design? How do we measure? How do we plan? How do we optimize all these journeys? So you go into like the operational aspects of it, but it's really a management philosophy of saying like our business is

focuses around the customer journeys. We organize around it. We have shared responsibilities around it and really put in resources and teams around solving the customer journeys today and the future journeys that we want to make possible. What Jochem is talking about is really why we're starting to hear more and more about journey management in the discussion right now is because

A lot of organizations are coming to this same realization right now. I feel like we're at this tipping point almost where we've spent a lot of time over the last decade or more investing in user-centered design and UX at product levels, and we've matured a lot. A lot of organizations have really mature product experiences.

But over that same time, the way that consumers and users consume experiences has changed dramatically just with the smartphone. We are so much more embedded in our experiences now. It's so much more immersive. People don't differentiate between...

You know, one interaction on their phone and the interaction on their desktop or something that happens five minutes later where they get another notification. We're always part of our experiences. So that journey level that Joachim talked about is amazing.

so much more impactful on our lives than it used to be. We used to be much more removed where we would kind of go away and then come back and interact. It's part of us now. It's part of our experience in the day-to-day. So when it's not designed well, that really is amplified nowadays. So I think that that's why we're starting to hear more about this at this time because

our customers are feeling the impact of that. And we're realizing, oh my goodness, you know, we can't just have great experiences at each product or interaction level, but the collective experience as a whole is also really important. And so we need to scale what we're doing, our user-centered design thinking and take it up that level like Joachim's talking about. And really journey management is,

seeking to help organizations apply that mindset and work in a way that allows them to execute and design good journeys. You had a really nice pause there, Kim. You said, like, customers are feeling, and then you continue to dissent, but I think that is the pinnacle of it all, right? Experience is about feeling.

How does it make people feel? How does it make employees feel connected to their customers? Right.

That is like wishy-washy in business. People cannot measure it. We cannot quantify it. And therefore, we don't really invest in it. But putting the customer journey in the center, then you have something tangible. Then you can actually manage it. You can actually see what the impact is of the solutions you bring to the market or the costs you're cutting because of your efficient work together. And I think that tangibility is now getting foothold in management, even in the board, saying like, okay, hang on a minute.

This is how we actually enable our company to be customer centric and not only do it on a strategic level, but actually also operate like it.

Yeah. Yeah. I think I hear two big things. One is like the impact of not managing it well, right. Leads to these kinds of disjointed experiences. And then the flip side is when companies do it well, then you have this outcome where you have measurable goals, measurable benchmarks, and it becomes something a lot more tangible. So I was wondering, um,

It's kind of a follow-up to the impact. What do you think is the negative impact? Because we do see that there's value, right? Being journey-centric brings value to an organization. But I guess I'm curious, what happens if you don't do it? And what exactly is that value? So there's a few things that...

I can foresee. I mean, I don't have like this crystal ball to show you what the future entails. But if you don't do it, there's going to be others that will and they will outcompete you. They will outperform you and people naturally just go with the route of the least friction. So if you can get insurance with three clicks, you will do that rather than to go over email, call up, visit an office. And I mean, that's the obvious example. So over time, the ones who invest in seamless journeys are

they will be the winners in whatever category field or product space or solution space they are. So that is one thing. But the other risk is that, and I know Kim speaks a lot about this, is that people tend to make this big. I mean, this can feel like a big transformation of sorts where your entire company is going to run on journeys and put an emphasis on that. So you can approach it two ways. Say like,

One is let's start small. And the other is, okay, we're going to go totally to the, to that side as a whole company. And then people get scared. They don't want to change and stuff gets awkward. Absolutely. Yeah. Kim. So related to that, like what is something that comes up quite often in the class, you know, about, about these kind of impacts and maybe how journey being journey centric brings more value.

Yeah, that's always the biggest question, Therese, among everybody right now, because this is really new. And I think everybody's gut instinct is this is the right way to go. We've kind of known that. People have always been looking for guidance and guidance.

proof and a playbook. And it's very hard to measure return on investment and experience at the product level. It's a little easier. But now that we're saying we need to invest in these longer experiences, the question is, how do we know that our investment is going to bring us return and that that is really going to propel our business forward and build business value?

So that's the big question. There is starting to be data that within, I mean, I've been studying this topic and looking for data and proof that this does drive business value for probably five years. And I'm just starting to see research firms putting out data, looking across industries over time and showing actual results correlating

performance that companies have in terms of customer satisfaction and calling out organizations that are being rated really high among consumers in terms of the satisfaction they have doing business with them and also their loyalty. And then firms are starting to correlate that data with actual performance data that

to say, okay, not only are these companies satisfying their customers and building loyalty among their customers, but they're also outperforming their competitors on lots of top level business metrics like revenue earned. So these are all public business metrics that are out there. So looking at revenue, stock prices,

things like that. So they have seen these themes, these trends transcend across industries where we're seeing those companies that are performing well for their customers are also performing well in the business. So that is a signal that we're really onto something. So that's always the biggest question. So yeah, actually, it seems like this is

like a no brainer thing to do. Like, obviously we want to have an experience that people are talking about, that people are happy about, excited about, but surprisingly not everyone does journey management in the true sense. So what would you say are the biggest hurdles to establishing a journey management practice?

So the first things that a company needs to do to get this off the ground is actually invest in understanding a few key journeys. And that is not saying like, hey, we have a checkout journey, we have a purchase journey, we have a buyer's journey, we have a renewal journey, we have like, these are the common journeys that we focus on. Okay, good. Let's measure them and off we go. No, it's really about understanding every step of those key journeys.

But figuring out what are those key journeys is already a challenge on its own for some organizations. So I would say that picking those and understanding them deeply, not only visualizing them as a journey, like literally step by step, and maybe the variations or the scenarios within them, but then also understanding how the business, how the processes, how the data and how the teams are organized to make that journey, which

Whether it's a good journey, a bad journey, it doesn't matter. But the journey as is, how are we doing that as a company? And that requires some time and investment and some people that are skilled and also motivated to do this. And that is, I think, what we're seeing now. More and more companies are investing in this and setting that up. So together, we're figuring this out. But having this in place is just the first step. And then the second, and it also ties to what you just said or just asked about, like,

is the business impact there. You can look at it on the top line or the bottom line or the NPS and make it very big. You can also make it very small, like, hey, what can we actually drive for the customer effort score in a particular, I don't know, in this case, a purchase journey? Like, do people experience high friction, low friction, a lot of effort, not effort at all? Like, and if we change something, improve something, whether it's in the product or actually around the product experience,

What is the impact of that? And making it as tangible as you can do it is very useful of making your first business case to get it going and to get the flywheel of journey management spinning rather than say like, oh, we're going to improve MPS. And then you're like one and a half years down the road and you still don't know if you did it or someone else did it or what actually influenced MPS.

Yeah, yeah, definitely seems like picking really specific goals. And I think you also spoke to something important, which is picking a few journeys. I think there's often this sense of overwhelm when you first learn about journey mapping, then the immediate thought is, wow, this is a useful tool. Let's map all the journeys. And like, there are going to be so many journeys that frankly, you can't map or it's just not feasible to map all of the journeys, but it's more important to pick a few key journeys, it seems like.

yeah we had those discussions as well internally like because ultimately you want to have all your journeys in place but one thing i'll say and i'm curious also to hear what kim has to say and what she knows from from the people that join her course because everyone is approaching it slightly differently still but understanding the ultimate framework how all these journeys are pieced together

It's not something you can ignore at the beginning. You can start with a few key journeys. That's great. But then knowing that, hey, this is the big framework, how everything fits together. Here's like three pieces of the puzzle I figured out.

It will give you like an overview of, okay, what is important to do next, but also to understand what we don't know. And I think those two things together make for a great start. It's not only like, hey, there's four key journeys and maybe there's two more, but trying to understand what all these other journeys might be is also useful to get started. Yeah. Kim, what are you seeing in, as far as I guess, what the biggest hurdles are in establishing journey management practices? Yeah.

I think we've talked a little bit about it already, but the biggest hurdles is internal, more sentiment, culture, the way people are thinking about the way they do their work. It's so ingrained in us to be really product focused. We're working in these fragmented spaces.

organizational functional groups like marketing is working together and product and everybody's kind of doing their own thing.

So when we come in and say, okay, journeys are important and we want to be user-centered and journey-centric, that kind of throws a stick in everybody's bicycle spokes, right? And now everyone's like, oh, wait, how do we do that? And what Joachim was talking about is really investing in the journey and understanding it and documenting those big key journeys is one step.

to help people understand, okay, this is how people are experiencing our products and services. So we need to work around that rather than asking people to experience around the way we work, which would be more internal centric point of view.

So once we have this realization, we have to kind of invest in building a culture around it, understanding the appetite that the organization, specifically leadership, has to

to invest in making some internal changes, maybe structuring teams differently, building some design operations to help people figure out how they're supposed to collaborate, to work together on fixing journeys. And so there's a lot that we have to sort of explore to say, okay, what is our leadership ready to do? Who is compelled to help us

make some decisions and maybe sponsor a team or a set of resources to do some exploratory work in this space. So that's one of the biggest hurdles is figuring out who your allies are and getting

getting someone in leadership to say, yes, let's do this. And then once we've done that, how do we roll it out broader? How do we scale it? And so that's a bigger exploratory activity. Okay, now let's look across all the people that we need to be part of this new way of working and how do we help them learn and train and invest in things

that's gonna help people adopt their way of working from the way they're used to doing things so that we're all working together toward the same goal and that is more in journey centric goal.

Yeah. So I think two big takeaways that I'm getting from this is number one, nobody likes to be told, Hey, you're doing your job wrong. We're going to have to change it completely. Everything you did before, you know, wasn't as good as it could be right. That that's a very real challenge. And again,

addressing the organizational culture around the work that people do and how personal does somebody take it when a criticism or a constructive piece of feedback is given for somebody's work? Because the people aspect of it is a very huge part of why journey management can be difficult. Not to mention the roles and responsibilities. I'm sure that, I mean, there's already a lot of

of just discourse about the term product and UX. Should they even be the same thing? Like there are so many different terms that can itself confuse the process of design, let alone designing with multiple journeys. So definitely seems like understanding the culture

And who currently reports to whom and just getting a good sense of how do people feel about their work and get that under control first. And then the second thing seemed to be starting small as well. But yeah, Kim, did you have something about that?

I was just going to add to that, Therese. I think that what you just said is understanding the culture and how people are doing their work. That's something that can really be done with what Joachim was talking about was understanding how we're delivering our journey now was one of the things that he says is really important to do first. Not only let's map our journey experience for the user, but let's understand how we operate to deliver that experience currently.

So part of that exploration and research can be to understand, you know, what are people's different roles along this way? How are, how are they feeling about it and start to prepare yourself for

to deliver a little bit of change and roll out change to those groups by understanding how they are impacting the journey as it is now. And we can also look a bit into the future of what might happen. I mean, journey management, if we're looking at like the coming decade where this is going to be more of the norm rather than a new practice, you can look at companies like Zendesk. When

When they launched, nobody had customer support or support management or something even vaguely named like that into their companies. And then four years down the road, I wouldn't say that it was only Zendesk who did it. It was like a whole community of people coming together. There's an org chart. There's a structure. There's management layers in place. There's reporting. There's rules like literally defined around that.

Same for product management. I mean, how long does that exist? 10, 20, 30 years, maybe tops. And we now have a whole set of rituals and roles around that. And we actually trying to find out what it means. And I think we're at the same stage for journey management, but just a little bit earlier in the life cycle of journey management, figuring it out. But maybe we can check it out in five or 10 years from now, listening back, there will be an org chart.

There's maybe even a chief journey officer in your board and there's journey managers, journey directors, there's VP of customer journey. There's all these different roles in the company that put the emphasis on this cross-functional horizon in our workflow in the business. So where we are today is not where we are going to be in two, three, five, maybe 10 years from now.

Yeah. So related to that, where we're going to be in the future, obviously there are some folks who already are doing journey management pretty well. So I was wondering if you could share a little bit about what doing this well looks like. I realize we have that new tool, TheyDo, which is obviously helping teams to figure this out. So I'm wondering if you could describe what are some of those capabilities? What are some of those

skills or activities that people might be doing in these more high performing organizations. High performing organizations also good to note, like sometimes, especially when it starts from a design angle, like in UX design or product design or service design,

there are enough people that understand what journey management or customer journeys actually mean and how to use them, how to use blueprints and how to actually navigate this complexity in the organization, bringing in the customer experience. So that is one thing. And then there's the maturity of the rest of the organization to use it, to work with it, to be part of it, and to actually create a culture around this. So

Those two levels of maturity should not be too far away from each other. And otherwise, you need to invest in making it closer together, both obviously going up. But if that is the case, we are learning from these customers as well. There's like fantastic examples where you see companies like Atlassian, they are very

a product company by nature the b2b sas company by nature making big investments in running on customer journeys where all their teams across different products and portfolios are starting to collaborate from the customer's perspective using journeys and

As a big company, they have tens of thousands of people working there and therefore also a lot of journeys to manage. But they did really, really well in the early days to say, okay, we understand there is a big journey framework.

that all these journeys will be part of. So getting a first stab at that was what they did. But then they said, okay, but we are going to invest in a few key journeys and a few key steps to get it up and run. Not like bring all the 180 designers of the company together and start doing this, but like, let's start small with the small pockets of journeys, then consolidate, then bring it to the next step. And on the other hand, we have an amazing company

insurance company in Canada, who is a little bit smaller in size, and they had done a CX transformation, customer experience transformation of sorts. So philosophically, or in more of a high level, they were ready as a company to

And they just needed tools to unlock it. So they started from or with the end in mind with all journeys in place and just needed a management tool to support their work. So those are like two sides of the approaches that we've seen. And maybe another one that I really like is the Dutch Postal Service.

like Royal Mill or equivalent of the US mill. And they are breaking down as we speak their NPS measurements all the way into four levels of customer journeys that they can actually measure, plan and organize around. It's a big, big work that they're doing, but they are making huge leaps doing this together across different teams.

Yeah, I would just to just put a bow on everything that Joachim explained. I like how you mentioned, you know, some teams, some organizations are starting small, maybe just focusing on a few things and doing things more in a grassroots way. Whereas some organizations have the buy-in and the vision to do a larger transformation and try to seek big change sooner. Every organization is different.

I think what ties them all together in terms of showing success and maturing in this is a mindset of journey-centered focus and also agility.

Being open to be nimble as an organization and make adjustments and not feel like you're stuck in your old ways of operating, but just being open-minded to make some small adjustments or big adjustments.

to meet the landscape where it's going and to be going along with the way we see, you know, experience design and the way consumers are experiencing our products and service and go with that rather than fighting that momentum. Yeah. Yeah. And this I think is actually a really good point to transition into what I think is a good takeaways question for our group here. But

Obviously, many teams might already be doing this, but many teams, probably more teams, are less likely to be doing this right now. And so they might be hearing this podcast thinking, yes, I see the value of doing this

How the heck am I going to get started? Where do I even begin? Yeah, so my course, Customer Journey Management, we speak to this specific problem. The audience for that is people who work in product and UX who understand that this is important. They see the value, but they understand, you know, this is a process that's going to happen where we have to scale our ability and start to implement capabilities to do this. So how do we get started?

A lot of it kind of just sums up what we've been talking about today. I always say, if you don't have your key journeys defined, understood and mapped, that's really where you have to start.

Because those maps, the visualizations are a great tool to go around and communicate and have important conversations with leaders and decision makers that you really need to understand the business value and value.

to help you make the decisions that are necessary to create movement and adopt some of the ways that you need to work and collaborate to actually execute. So starting with understanding and mapping and documenting those. And then at the same time in parallel,

Figuring out who your allies are, starting to build relationships, establishing dialogue with people on other functional groups, leadership roles, who you know are going to be part of that collaborative network of people that you'll be working with as you start to design things across journeys and starting to kind of build the culture.

Yeah. Actually, it's funny. I started smiling as you were saying all the networking and discussing with the people who are going to be your allies. I remember when I was new to UX, I never really realized how political of an activity or an endeavor some of our work can be, especially since a lot of our work does involve not just making things look aesthetically pleasing, but actually deeply understanding our customers and

As a result, that knowledge impacts more than just color palettes. It impacts design decisions. It impacts business decisions and business strategies. So it does end up being a very political in nature responsibility at times to start building those allies.

Now, Jochem, I would love to hear your thoughts as well. As co-founder of TheyDo, what can you say about what TheyDo offers as far as different capabilities? And what advice could you give to teams looking to get started? So in the future, I believe that the best companies just work journey-centric.

But to get there, there is a now and there is a way of working once you're set up, right? What Kim speaks to is true. You need to get started with understanding these key journeys. But once you realize how you can start making impact, you're looking beyond understanding a few of these key journeys and you want to start managing. So basically, journey management with Dedu enables teams to...

improve the customer experience working as one while being part of many different teams in many different time zones or many different locations at the same time where we help to create alignment

make those business decisions. And what they do does really well is beyond, let's say, journey framework, stacking up all the journeys and making sure that people can understand them, access them, continuously research, capture their findings, their data, and really make those journeys come to life. We also offer a workflow from inside to implementation. Say like, how are the opportunities from this journey

stacking up to all the opportunities that we see in a particular area of business or a particular focus that we have as a company or the way we use it internally. So like we have OKRs, objective key results, and then how do the opportunities in the journeys actually inform these objectives that we have? So making that instant customer and business alignment possible

is what we basically get out of bed for every day. And we just help shape the tools of the future of journey management for tomorrow. And I think we're just getting started. Absolutely. I think, yeah, giving the disembodied monster of journey management, you know, a body, giving it a form, I think can make it really,

a lot easier to talk about. And I also think like, not only is it easier to talk about, but, but I think it gives everyone something to point to. And, and it probably does help with that culture aspect. It probably does help in the sense that we're no longer pointing at each other as like, Oh, you're responsible for this one specific task. And therefore this whole journey lies on your shoulders, right? Like those kinds of less subjective conversations are less likely because you have something objective that you can point to. So it's,

It sounds like journey management is, you know, uh, going to be growing in maturity, you know, as a whole. And I'm really excited to hear about the work that you all are doing. So to wrap up, um, if anyone wants to follow your work, um, where could you point people to, uh, we'll start with Joachim. Well, uh, data.com. Uh, that's the easiest place to get started. If you are really serious about setting this up for your company and, um,

believe that this is the next thing. You can also DM me on LinkedIn. Ask me anything you want. I mean, we are quite busy building this out, but if you're serious about this, I would love to hear from you, learn from you and see how you're doing.

Absolutely. And Kim, for those who want to read more about your work, I know you're often putting out articles. Where could you point people to? I would just say subscribe to the nngroup.com newsletter. That's where everything new that we publish goes out first. So if you're watching the newsletter, you're going to see any new research that I'm putting out, which is

By the way, I'm in the middle of a pretty in-depth study where I'm actually just observing and watching teams and how they're trying to solve this problem. So I'm going to be writing about that, putting out some case studies and trying to pull together some trends and themes from that research that's going to be coming out in the next few months.

All right, sounds good. We'll include all those links in the show notes. But I just wanted to say, you know, I'm really grateful that you are both here speaking with me today. I enjoyed this conversation a lot. And I think the audience is going to get a lot out of this as they look forward to a new era of user experience design. So thank you, Joachim. Thank you, Kim. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Therese. It's so nice to be here. Thank you so much, Therese. That was Kim Salazar and Joachim van der Veer.

If you want to learn more about them and their work, you can check the episode notes for links to some of the courses, articles, and websites so that you can get started on journey management. But don't forget, we also have thousands of articles, videos, and reports on our website, www.nngroup.com. And if you enjoy this show in particular, of course, please subscribe or follow on the podcast platform of your choice. This episode was hosted by me, Therese Fessenden, and produced by Tim Neu-Sesser.

We are thrilled to have Tim on our growing production team. All editing and post-production is by Jonas Zellner. Music is by Tiny Music and Dresden the Flamingo. That's it for today's show. Until next time, remember, keep it simple.