This is Journey Management. Episode 2. Martina Francella

[00:00:00] Marc Stickdorn: Welcome to This is Journey Management. I'm Marc Stickdorn. My guest today is Martina Francella, senior service designer at Zurich Insurance. She helped to scale journey management to more than 120 users across 17 countries. I just listened to our conversation again. We're talking about the "so what" moment that really reshaped her practice.

[00:00:26] Marc Stickdorn: We're talking about why starting small is much better than boiling the whole ocean, and why journey management is much more a decision system than a design system. Let's get into it.

[00:00:43] Marc Stickdorn: Welcome to This is Journey Management. My guest today is Martina. I've known Martina for many years, but I know many of you don't know who Martina is yet, which is a shame, because you should know her, because she's fantastic.

[00:01:01] Martina Francella: Thank you, Marc.

[00:01:02] Marc Stickdorn: What do you do?

[00:01:02] Martina Francella: I'm a senior service designer at Zurich. I've been at Zurich Insurance, the global office, so corporate centre here in Zurich.

[00:01:11] Martina Francella: So I work in Zurich at Zurich. I've been in this position, so I started as an intern actually, four and a half years ago. So I was hired by my current boss, Tom. And I used to work with another manager that was kind of my mentor as well in service design, and the person that I've learned most of what I know about service design from, to be honest.

[00:01:43] Martina Francella: Because my background is not, I haven't studied service design. I studied business and economics, and then I was an economics researcher for a bit. And then I ended up in a two-year master's at the Politecnico in communication design. And then after working as a graphic designer for a bit, and in a fine art printing laboratory for a bit, I landed a job in an insurance company, which sounds a bit random.

[00:02:13] Martina Francella: And yeah, today I'm here four and a half years in, and it's been way more exciting than what I expected from insurance. I'm not sure if I can say this, but

[00:02:26] Martina Francella: yeah.

[00:02:30] Marc Stickdorn: It's great. I know the work you're doing there, and that's fantastic. And the work Itziar started at Zurich.

[00:02:39] Marc Stickdorn: Itziar is a name in the community. Many of you have known her for 15 years or so. And it was great to work with both of you over the time. So it's fantastic what you achieved there. How did you end up in service design? And maybe you can also go back in time and say, how did Zurich end up with journey

[00:03:00] Martina Francella: management?

[00:03:01] Martina Francella: So me ending up in service design was as random as me ending up in insurance, if I need to be honest. But once I started working as a service designer, I was, whoa, this is it. I think this is a great discipline, great approaches, and it connected a lot of things that I studied in economics with the design approach.

[00:03:23] Martina Francella: So I really enjoyed it. It felt like the perfect confluence of my economics and design backgrounds coming together. In terms of journey management, I remember when Itziar joined, the reason why she was called in was to develop a service design practice at Zurich.

[00:03:49] Martina Francella: And we had just started. We were a team of service designers at corporate centre. And I think the first thing we did, because we had to enable a CX transformation, a CX strategy, and let the CX strategy roll out throughout the organisation. We are a big decentralised organisation. We have many different business units, many countries, different maturity levels.

[00:04:12] Martina Francella: So this is also a big disclaimer for the whole episode. This comes from my experience in such an organisation. So for a smaller, agile or a bit more mature one, it might not resonate as much with you. We started interviewing the practitioners across the organisation. Some were coming from design, some were coming from analytics, some were coming from business development.

[00:04:35] Martina Francella: And after interviewing them, we realised that there were key topics that were recurring, and journey management felt like the natural answer to this. For example, silos that didn't talk to each other, CX that was getting stuck a bit at middle management.

[00:04:57] Martina Francella: And, you know, getting that data-driven decision making when it came to design and CX, and getting a seat at the table as well, having a shared vocabulary with the business. So all of that was there, and how are we going about this? And I remember, after Service Design Days in 2022, we came back and it was like, journey management.

[00:05:28] Martina Francella: And from there on we started thinking about the programme.

[00:05:32] Marc Stickdorn: Fantastic. And so how does it look today?

[00:05:35] Martina Francella: So what happened since then? When we started thinking about it, first, the first six months, it was like, okay, what is journey management? What are we doing? We took your course in the meantime.

[00:05:47] Martina Francella: And I think we started thinking about, okay, what are the elements we need to start this? So a taxonomy, a platform, a shared vocabulary with at least the CX teams within the countries. Maybe a set of countries we can start this with based on their level of maturity. And just FYI, all the assumptions we had, we were all wrong.

[00:06:12] Martina Francella: And you know, what we thought would've worked didn't. And then other stuff worked. And we tried them all. We tried them all. And then from there we started selecting the platform. So this process took us a bit longer because of course we had other priorities in between. So this whole process of defining a bit what is the system, the taxonomy, the platform, what are the right views?

[00:06:38] Martina Francella: It took a year. And then from there, Itziar was very good, I think, in building the room for it, getting the opportunity to position journey management in the right way. And she got the funding as well, and a team. So that was very good. Then we managed to connect it to strategic priorities of the organisation.

[00:07:01] Martina Francella: And from there we chose three key countries, no, four. Three countries, and then a fourth one came along by itself. And then from there we started with different approaches, and we started to see how we could enable this practice there. And yeah, as of today, journey management looks very different depending on which countries you talk with.

[00:07:31] Martina Francella: At Zurich, we have over 17 countries doing journey work. And this will go to one of my points later. I don't like to talk about, you know, mapping and management and this. I like to talk about journey work, and how we use journeys in the organisation. So I think some countries are more advanced than others, and there are different takes on it.

[00:07:54] Martina Francella: But we have over 15 countries in Smaply, Marc. And then 120 users, and they're quite active, across APAC, LATAM and EMEA. So, yeah.

[00:08:09] Marc Stickdorn: Fantastic. Let me go back to a tiny sentence. You said, then we got budget. Because that is, if I talk to people at conferences or in any calls I have, that is often the thing. If folks try to bring journey management into their organisation, they're motivated, they want to do it, but then they need to get budget.

[00:08:35] Marc Stickdorn: And it sounds so easy when you said that, but I know it wasn't easy. It was a journey in itself. Do you have any tips? What actually made the organisation think this is valuable to put some budget into

[00:08:50] Martina Francella: this? So, to be fully frank, I do have a perspective on this. I was not in all the conversations at the time, because I was an intern and then a junior designer.

[00:08:57] Martina Francella: So you're not always there. I am in those conversations now, but it's a different one, right? Because we already started. So it's a different one. I think, in our specific case, because we are corporate centre, we thought we could build this bottom-up, right? But you do need a bit of top-down.

[00:09:19] Martina Francella: So to actually even get the momentum, it is key to connect it to some strategic priorities, and key to connect it to business decisions. And that means, and this goes to one of the points that I'll talk about later, we always think about journey management as a practice, a programme that is on its own and connects to the business and the other things, but it kind of always feels a bit in parallel when you tell the narrative. You need to build a narrative that is, and now I'm going to start using my hands.

[00:09:53] Martina Francella: I'm very Italian in this. I'm sorry, guys, for those who see it. But it should be ingrained and connected, extremely embedded with what the business is doing. And I know we've heard this several times and we keep saying it, but for instance, you need to have patience. You need to have patience and get the right moment where the business, I do have one example.

[00:10:22] Martina Francella: It's a very specific example. One of the countries managed to get budget and momentum with the business, and buy-in, and therefore more money to actually put in almost two journey managers, because one was part-time. So a journey manager and a half, we would say.

[00:10:42] Martina Francella: At the beginning, they spotted the right opportunity. And the right opportunity is not always where you think it is. So for instance, in their case it was compliance. I remember I talked about this at a conference in Stockholm around journey ops. Because of Consumer Duty in the UK, you needed to comply with certain terms.

[00:11:09] Martina Francella: And the business was overwhelmed by the amount of KPIs they had to track to see if they were compliant or not in terms of Consumer Duty. And they thought, okay, you know what? Journey management could be the answer. And then from there, because the need was so obvious and they didn't know how to go about this, and everything was taking so long and everybody was so overwhelmed, they positioned it in the right way.

[00:11:35] Martina Francella: So it does need to start, I know that it's about the customer, and you should put the customer in front. But remember that your audience is the business here. Your audience, the ones that need to make decisions with the artefact, is the business. So when I think about journey work, I think your journeys should be customer-based, but decision-made. Designed for the decisions, right?

[00:12:01] Martina Francella: So they're customer-grounded, but the decision is what enables the design in the proper way for your audience, in the end. Never forgetting the customers, though.

[00:12:13] Marc Stickdorn: I love that. Yes, yes, yes. And it's such a great point, because we see compliance as one of the leading factors, especially what you mentioned, the FCA regulation around Consumer Duty.

[00:12:27] Marc Stickdorn: It's such a driver for journey management, because it's so obvious that by applying this, you become compliant. And it's such a different story you're telling them. Great. Thanks. That was fantastic. Now, I know you also brought some visuals, because I think it's great to talk about journey management, but it would be great to see it.

[00:12:48] Marc Stickdorn: How does it look, as much as you are allowed to share? We are not going to share any secrets. Stuff blurred out and so on. Yeah.

[00:12:56] Martina Francella: Before we show, would you like me to talk through a bit of context? Because I chose, I could have shown you many maps with many different structures. And for whoever's interested, just call me and we can talk about how to structure a map. It's not a problem.

[00:13:09] Martina Francella: I love this, because it's like solving a riddle, right? You have this amount of information, a puzzle, not a riddle. You have this amount of information and you need to structure it in the right way for the right audience. But I think the most important part of that is, I remember the first time I was putting this in front of a business person.

[00:13:27] Martina Francella: It was my second year at Zurich and I had this mentor. He was a C-level underwriter. So imagine, the easiest audience ever. And I was working on a system of maps for a segment he had a strategic priority about. So I was like, perfect. I'm just going to put in front of him the map that I've built with KPIs.

[00:13:45] Martina Francella: It was not too complex, right? But I think as designers, we are used to a cognitive load that is way more, especially as service designers, way more than usual business people have. But anyway. So I put it in front of him and he's like, this is lots of very useful information, but so what? And I was like, ouch.

[00:14:07] Martina Francella: Okay. And this is something that every designer learns at some point, but especially when you do journey work and you use journeys to make decisions with the business, you need to understand that the journey needs to grow with their understanding, their maturity, but also, the artefact is not the point.

[00:14:29] Martina Francella: And I think the artefact has been the point for so long that, as designers, we are not used to it. The decision is the key point of it. Right. So with this in mind, I had to start implementing the practice in a country. And now Marc, if you share the presentation, I'll show you what was the first thing that actually enabled decisions.

[00:14:53] Martina Francella: And then you tell me what you think about that. If you even think it's a map or not.

[00:15:00] Marc Stickdorn: Here.

[00:15:01] Martina Francella: Well, you see, it's very basic, and trust me, when I put it in front of stakeholders, I was like, oh my God, this is not going to work. But what you see, for those who are listening, is just a lane with stages, a lane with customer actions.

[00:15:17] Martina Francella: And then I think a lane with the advisor actions, because we have different actors in insurance journeys, and then a lane with what are the documents that were sent to the customer. Marc, what do you think about this?

[00:15:35] Marc Stickdorn: I think it's great, because it focuses on one very clear point. And that is often one issue we have with journeys. We are overloading our audience with information, so they don't have the ability to focus on whatever is important for them. So I think you made this map to make an important point around, yeah, the documents

[00:15:59] Martina Francella: in this journey.

[00:15:59] Martina Francella: Right. What happened is, and this is a point that I really want to stress, this thing, this map, let's call it, it's already a journey for me. So this journey was put in front of stakeholders, and for the first time they could see what documents, because these documents were sent from different ops teams, they could see all the documents that were sent to the customer.

[00:16:20] Marc Stickdorn: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:21] Martina Francella: And then we managed to get them to understand this and make a decision that they had to act upon something, that they had to do something about it. So two weeks later we came back, and if you go to the next slide, we also gave them some pain points. And here you don't see them because I could not put them in, but we added a link with pain points and a link with not a lot of KPIs, but just customer satisfaction and service level agreement.

[00:16:47] Martina Francella: The service levels, right? And then from there, what they could do, they could prioritise. What documents should be rephrased, redone, maybe made digital instead of physical, and so on and so forth. So they were enabled to make those decisions. And this is what I was trying to say before, you start with an artefact, you enable one decision.

[00:17:14] Martina Francella: It's the most basic one, but that creates demand to see the journey again. So the maturity of the artefact is based on the demand that the business has for it. And you need to create a bit of it. I think this comes into play, this comes a bit from my sales days. You need to create a bit of the appetite for the business to want this more, and also balance it with not overwhelming them.

[00:17:39] Martina Francella: Of course, this was, I don't know, three years ago, and this is just the extra. It's not sexy, but it does the job. And if you go to the next one, I mean, right now, the map, and I'm sorry you see it so far away, because I cannot show you.

[00:17:57] Marc Stickdorn: I'll zoom in a little bit.

[00:18:00] Martina Francella: Yeah. But if you see

[00:18:00] Marc Stickdorn: the map now, they like that.

[00:18:01] Martina Francella: And this is one of a bigger system of maps. You see, you have all the stages. You have three different actors playing. You have the Zurich actions, you have stages, description, the emotional journey, several KPIs. And of course, if you scroll down, you have sub- journeys connected to it.

[00:18:21] Martina Francella: Pain points, internal gaps, opportunities, solutions. And this is one of the high-level ones. Imagine when we're going into more detailed ones. And then we have of course documents connected, and many more things, right? Insights, qualitative research, and many, many, many more things. With some Figma prototypes connected to it and embedded in the maps. And of course we don't put this in front of stakeholders.

[00:18:51] Martina Francella: It's not always one view. We created different views, thanks to Smaply. We can create these filtered views. And then based on the audience you have, you filter the map based on personas, based on the lanes that you want to show. And you can tell the story, right? But this is to say we started from three basic lanes, customer stages, customer actions and documents.

[00:19:12] Martina Francella: And now this map is used to prioritise things as a customer experience team, to prioritise things throughout the overall customer office in this country. It enables generation of executive insights for partner leader reviews. And I think it's a pretty cool progression. I'm really proud of it.

[00:19:34] Marc Stickdorn: You can be proud of it. Wow. I mean, just look at the change from this to this. That already makes it actionable. And I think that is the whole idea. It always was the idea of a journey map, right? We never created a map just to have a map. It was always to drive decisions. I think that is a fantastic example of how you bring it in and force decision making.

[00:20:04] Marc Stickdorn: Through the map. That's great. Well done. And that brings us to a point you actually wanted to make about,

[00:20:15] Martina Francella: yeah.

[00:20:16] Marc Stickdorn: And breaking the rules. Is that right?

[00:20:18] Martina Francella: I remember when we started looking at these maps and everything, and we do have all these rules through which you write pain points.

[00:20:28] Martina Francella: How you write an opportunity area, what is the right structure, for example, what is a journey map? What is a service blueprint? And you have a book about it, Marc, that I've read very carefully. But when you are in the job and you're working with people that might not have a service design background, because they got to CX from different angles, or you're working with the business people, right?

[00:20:57] Martina Francella: And they do have those needs, and they do need to make those decisions. So what do you do? And then I remember we were creating the structure for the first map. Not at that basic level, when we started evolving a bit. And I remember having a discussion with Itziar, and I was like, no, but as a service blueprint, we should structure it like this and then put those things on top.

[00:21:21] Martina Francella: But it never worked, because the rules are there to be broken, in a sense. So you have a mental structure, but then it needs to be ruthless. Ruthless, I don't know how to say it, but extremely pragmatic. You need to be extremely pragmatic, which sometimes, and I put myself in it as a designer, you don't want to be, because there's always a way to improve it, to add a lane because it enables the root cause analysis, and you think it's going to help. But in the end, it just adds another layer that people are not ready to take in. Again, within my context.

[00:22:00] Martina Francella: Right. And with a team that is limited for the size of the things that we need to do. Yeah.

[00:22:09] Marc Stickdorn: I have another question. When I saw your journey map, it was actually quite simple in the structure as well, in the stages and so on. From many organisations, I know that even though it looks simple, it is often the result of a lot of

[00:22:33] Marc Stickdorn: back and forth between different political parties about what you call things. How easy or how hard is it for you to get alignment within your own team, but also within the different business units, on what you call things?

[00:22:49] Martina Francella: So we did the main structure of what we call the atlas. So for example, you have an atlas for retail customers. You would have a life cycle, then level two journeys, level three journeys, and so on and so forth.

[00:23:01] Martina Francella: And it branches out a lot. It looks a bit like a tree as well. And we started co-creating that with the business units in the countries, with the customer experience teams. And that was important, because we wanted some input that was not just from group. Otherwise you're just group in the ivory tower making decisions and not involving people.

[00:23:23] Martina Francella: Right. Then from a political perspective, we got a bit lucky in that sense, because customer experience, design, journeys, I mean, that's our reality. Nobody touches it. And then you're so loud about it and you put it in so many places, but you need to be loud about it, right? So you need to be aligned, at least within your closer team.

[00:23:47] Martina Francella: You need to agree on those. And me and Itziar, we had a lot of discussions. Look, I'm very stubborn, she's very stubborn. So it took us some time to get to an agreement. But I think within the wider organisation, because it's customer experience and people always think customer experience, customer experience design, it connects journeys.

[00:24:08] Martina Francella: It's your space. Nobody touches it. Of course, we had to align a bit with our TNPS programme, because they had stages as well. And that took a bit of time, and that took a bit of alignment. But I think if you bring people into the room, you sit them at the table with you while you're making the decision, that's always going to help.

[00:24:29] Martina Francella: Don't be scared. Don't do something and then hope nobody realises that you've done it. Just bring them in the room, have a discussion. I know that those alignment meetings are not always the best, but if you do it from the beginning, it's going to pay off in the long term.

[00:24:50] Martina Francella: And to be fair, that also brings back a bit the idea that sometimes, especially with journey management, I do feel it is a business operations discipline with a design DNA, more than a design-led initiative, when you do it at scale for an enterprise. Mm-hmm.

[00:25:12] Martina Francella: If I need to be honest. And therefore sometimes how you call things in the life cycle and everything, it needs to be customer-centred, but it also needs to reflect the programmes and what you're trying to push a bit. So there's always a balance there. As a young designer, you want to change the world.

[00:25:33] Martina Francella: I was like, no, Itziar, this is not customer-centric. I remember we had this discussion. I was like, but we need to push for this. And so we always had that thing to balance out. Yeah.

[00:25:47] Marc Stickdorn: So it needs to use the language the organisation understands, right? The language the organisation speaks. Otherwise,

[00:25:53] Martina Francella: it always needs to remember, remember we're talking about customers and people, so you know,

[00:25:59] Marc Stickdorn: mm-hmm.

[00:26:00] Martina Francella: It's a compromise that you need to make.

[00:26:04] Marc Stickdorn: Yes. I love that. And I really liked how you said how you got there, because I often have the feeling, when we work in design, naturally we work iteratively. We start somewhere and then we think about what is the next most valuable step. When I talk to some organisations that get started with journey management, they actually think waterfall.

[00:26:29] Marc Stickdorn: They want to plan the world. They want to create the whole atlas. They want to map everything. Only then to realise, just as you said, after a year in or so, they realise, no, the world looks different than we planned.

[00:26:43] Martina Francella: I do,

[00:26:43] Marc Stickdorn: do you have any tips on that?

[00:26:44] Martina Francella: First of all, I do think this is a loop, right? This is a loop. It means, as I said before, the artefact enables a decision.

[00:26:55] Martina Francella: The decision creates demand, and you build on top of that. And the maps, and the maturity of the programme, and the maturity of the artefacts you build, grow with the business understanding. Therefore, you probably have never worked with underwriters before. You might have worked with tech teams, but what about claims, or what about ops, or proposition managers, right?

[00:27:19] Martina Francella: So you cannot know. As I said before, customer-based, but it needs to be decision design, right? So how can you design if you don't involve them? And that iterative loop is key, right? And that's why I also struggle a bit with the distinction, not distinction, but that you have mapping and then you have management.

[00:27:40] Martina Francella: No, it's a loop. You map, you manage the journey, and then you map again and you update, of course. Then when you scale it, you need ops. You need ops, because you need governance and roles. But the management has always been there. We treat it as a new discipline, and I know you might hate me for this, but it's not a new discipline.

[00:27:59] Martina Francella: It's that we are finally using this asset in the proper way. And I think this might also solve the problem that a lot of consultants have, right? That they were building a map, the map was the end goal, and then they were leaving and nothing changed. Now, also with tools like Smaply, as a consultant, my suggestion would be, why don't you drive the adoption in the organisation? So you might actually see some changes based on the work you've done.

[00:28:23] Martina Francella: So yeah.

[00:28:29] Marc Stickdorn: Yay. Yay. And that's not new. That's the thing, right? Exactly. We always did maps to have impact. And if we didn't have impact in our design work, we need to understand why, what happened. And I often have the feeling today that it feels like this is the magic pill. Take it,

[00:28:54] Marc Stickdorn: everything will be good. No, it's not. It's the governance system around it. What we're talking about is not a design system, it's a decision system in organisations. And that's what we need to focus on. How can we impact the system?

[00:29:07] Martina Francella: But that's what we've been doing for 20 years, trying to do this for a long time.

[00:29:11] Martina Francella: But if you had given journey maps to management consultants or anything, it might have been a different game for them. I don't know. But I think the ops part, the governance, the whole system around it, that's another point that I wanted to make, because I struggled quite a bit with it.

[00:29:31] Martina Francella: Because when you scale it, it's an enterprise, journey management becomes a bit industrialised in a way, when you have to do it in a lot of countries. You need the right people. You need the right people, and you need a set of muscles that might not be what you expect. Because, as I said before, sales instinct helps, pragmatism, a lot of patience, because the business doesn't move in sprints, or not always.

[00:30:00] Martina Francella: The business teams, they don't move like design teams. And then I remember I had to hire for journey manager roles that would support me in embedding the practice within the countries. And if you would check the positions across LinkedIn, it would really sound like a senior service design role, or a business design or service design role.

[00:30:26] Martina Francella: It would sound like something like that. But then I hired senior service designers that were so unhappy, because they expected to do design work. And I know that this is a decision system with a design DNA, but the craft is not part of the day-to-day. What you need to do in the day-to-day is update the maps.

[00:30:52] Martina Francella: You need to support business cases with KPI analysis from the journey. You need to work prioritisation sessions and meet with the business teams. And I remember this senior service designer, she was working with me. She's like, I didn't know what I was signing up for.

[00:31:09] Martina Francella: I'm working in an ops team. And I was like, I'm so sorry. And it's like, I just want to design a good to- be experience. I get you, in a sense. And sometimes I miss it as well. Maybe this is a question also for you, right? Because I haven't cracked it. What's an honest role, beyond doing a good job?

[00:31:37] Martina Francella: Because those people, it's not that we're not doing a good job, it's just that we're not happy about it. And you want people to be happy to work in a programme that is super cool, I think. Right? So I don't know what's the answer, because I come from a mixed background.

[00:31:53] Martina Francella: I've done economics, done design, then worked in different fields. So to me it's a natural transition. But how do you find the right people to work in this, that want to drive it? Because you need to want to drive it in an organisation like ours. Maybe it's a question for you. Maybe you can help me, Marc.

[00:32:10] Marc Stickdorn: Yeah.

[00:32:14] Marc Stickdorn: Well, it's a more general question, right? What is the difference between service design and journey management? And for me, service design, or any design discipline, or whatever, however you call what we are doing, be it UX design if you focus on digital tools, if it's innovation, yeah,

[00:32:36] Marc Stickdorn: if you want to have a bigger, whatever you might call it, it is the practice of taking something and making it better. And that is project-by-project work. What journey management does is it gives you the coordination framework for it, to understand what is the next project, where do we get the biggest bang for our buck?

[00:32:58] Marc Stickdorn: Where should we invest, so we can improve customer experience the most, or we can decrease cost the most, whatever, right, the strategy you are following in the organisation. So it is more coordination work. That's why we often call journey management journey ops, or an information system for the organisation.

[00:33:20] Marc Stickdorn: And I think it's really important that every organisation finds its own language for how they call it, so it resonates within their organisation. But just as you described it, it is often also what happens to designers if they move up the hierarchy in the organisation. At some point you become a manager, which means you're not working with the tools yourself anymore.

[00:33:43] Marc Stickdorn: You're managing a team that is doing the work. And we see that these are different people than the ones who are working with their hands and trying to improve it. You need a different skillset, and to be happy with your own work, you need to have a fit between what you like doing, what you can do, and what the job actually needs.

[00:34:06] Marc Stickdorn: Yes. Fantastic. That's a good conversation. I have, maybe to end this, two or three smaller questions. Because I would love, once you're here, to pick your brain a little bit for those who are rather new to it. Do you have any tips for those who are just getting started, or who see this and say, I want to try journey management?

[00:34:38] Marc Stickdorn: What would be your top three tips? These are the things, do this and try it out. What

[00:34:44] Martina Francella: are the first things people should do? First, find the business team that is receptive. It doesn't have to be a business team, but someone that has decision making power to change the experience of the customer, right?

[00:34:57] Martina Francella: Make sure they're receptive, or they have an issue that is urgent enough and they don't know how to solve. And within a bigger organisation, I think you can spot those, right? And then start small. But not just small in terms of lanes of information that you give them, also small in terms of what you're trying to show of the experience, right?

[00:35:23] Martina Francella: Don't try to boil the life cycle, because this is going to overwhelm them. Start small and make it resonate with them. And then put the map in front of people right away. Don't do the draft version and then show the other. No, no. When people say, no, no, no, but I'm doing a draft in my personal space and then I'm going. No, it needs to be out there.

[00:35:46] Martina Francella: I might sound a bit harsh, sorry, but own your work. You are there. There is a reason why you're there. You need to own it and put it in front of them. Don't be scared. And if they criticise it for one hour, that's good, because next time you're going to have a better one. And the last one, instead of creating ad hoc meetings for this, try to understand when these decision makers, right,

[00:36:16] Martina Francella: or the team that can make decisions, they probably have recurring meetings. Ask for 15 minutes at the end of one of their recurring meetings. So it's not going to feel like something on top of their work, but it's going to feel like something that is ingrained in what they're already doing. And this is more of a perception thing, right?

[00:36:34] Martina Francella: But it did work well, for me at least.

[00:36:39] Marc Stickdorn: Fantastic tips. Thanks for that. And if you start with it, what is a moment you should look forward to? A moment to celebrate. When you see this is happening, this is the moment your team or yourself can pop the champagne bottle and say, yes, that is what we were waiting for.

[00:37:02] Martina Francella: There are probably two. What is this moment?

[00:37:02] Martina Francella: One, the very first win, I think, is you show the map within a bigger team that needs to make decisions, and you receive questions after the meeting. People writing to you. Okay, this has landed. They want more. So you actually created that demand, that high.

[00:37:22] Martina Francella: They want more. And that's a very good sign. It doesn't matter if it's an official request or just a Teams message or a Slack message. It doesn't matter. They want more. So it's helping them. And then I think, once you've made a decision and they've implemented that decision, the first update of the map, and you see that it's becoming a recurring thing, right?

[00:37:47] Martina Francella: So once you've created a bit of that loop, so the first, second meeting, I think that's also a big win. Not beyond that. But I think if you get those two points, celebrate big time, because changing people's mental models or ways of working is super hard.

[00:38:09] Martina Francella: Especially, and people are like, we're all lazy and we are all busy. And you don't want to shift your mental model. I have a family company with my sister and my brother. I remember when we started this, we definitely needed to improve our logistics and the overall ops behind it. So I was like, let's use journey management.

[00:38:30] Martina Francella: And I put my sister in front of it. She's like, no, no, no, no, no. That's too complex. I don't want to deal with that. What is that? She works in sales, right? So she had no time for this. So it's really, really hard. Yeah.

[00:38:44] Marc Stickdorn: That's so great. I didn't know. So for those who don't know, Martina's family is from Italy.

[00:38:53] Marc Stickdorn: Thank you. One of the best olive oil producers you can get. I'm a customer myself. It's Marc-approved. We use it. It's fantastic. Get more olive oil. But I didn't know that you used journey management for your family business. That is just,

[00:39:10] Martina Francella: I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd. Nerd.

[00:39:12] Marc Stickdorn: That's fantastic.

[00:39:16] Martina Francella: Imagine, imagine my mum, that doesn't even know how to use Instagram. Thanks for that, WhatsApp. It's already so, and then I put her in front of Smaply. I was like, come on now. We need to make decisions.

[00:39:31] Marc Stickdorn: Okay. That in itself demands its own episode. I'd love to, of course. Journey management for a family business. Hear about that.

[00:39:40] Marc Stickdorn: Yes. That's great. I'll make sure we put a link to your family business in the description as well. So if people are interested to see the results of that, go have a look. Martina, it's fantastic to have you here in my new podcast. Renewed podcast, is what I wanted to say. Is there anything else

[00:40:06] Martina Francella: you would like to share? Beyond the fact that I'm honestly super grateful for the fact that I got to know this discipline and programme, and it made it so interesting.

[00:40:19] Martina Francella: Because you really see an organisation shift. And that was a big thank you to my manager, because you can really see things moving. And I've also learned a lot of patience, and I'm not a very patient person. Right. And our generation is known not to be patient, Gen Z and others, blah, blah, blah. So I've learned a lot of patience, but the work is worth it.

[00:40:42] Martina Francella: And when you see the fruits of it, and I see people now referring to things that we built three years ago across the organisation, it's like, wow. And I'll close with that, because I have another call.

[00:40:56] Marc Stickdorn: Fantastic. Thank you very much, Martina. That was great. Ciao. Thank you. Take care.