[00:00:00] Marc Stickdorn: Welcome to This is Journey Management. Today we zoom out. My guest is Esa Nettamo, founder of JourneyOps, who spent years spotting patterns across hundreds of journey management practitioners with his event series JourneyOps. We talk about why tooling is only 10% of the work, how to win budgets with business outcomes, and why journey management takes months, and not workshops, to stick. Esa, welcome.

[00:00:35] Marc Stickdorn: Welcome to a new episode of This is Journey Management. With me today is someone I have known for a long time and respected for a long time in the field of journey management. It's Esa. Esa, welcome.

[00:00:51] Esa Nettamo: Hey, thanks. Thanks for inviting me. Great to be here.

[00:00:55] Marc Stickdorn: Esa, it's great to have you. And I think you will bring a very unique perspective into today's episode, because we're not talking about a specific case study, but we talk more about journey management as a practice and how it evolved over time. So for those who don't know you, can you introduce yourself? Esa, who are you?

[00:01:18] Esa Nettamo: Yeah, so my name is Esa Nettamo, founder of JourneyOps, which is a home for journey management practitioners. Like you said, we organize large in-person events, like we did last September together with you in Stockholm. We have done six events now in the past two and a half years. Then this spring we launched the JourneyOps Circle, which is our attempt to connect global journey management practitioners into an online community.

[00:01:49] Esa Nettamo: And through this, what we aim to do is, first, educate the market about what journey management is, so that more and more organizations understand that it is the way to actually systematically approach customer-centricity. And then we work with individual organizations on helping them to actually take the first steps and then go on to the scaling part. So that's what we are doing.

[00:02:16] Marc Stickdorn: Fantastic. I know you live in Helsinki. You are Finnish, I guess, right?

[00:02:22] Esa Nettamo: Yeah, Finnish. I'm living in Helsinki, three kids, and now a newborn dog as well.

[00:02:29] Marc Stickdorn: A newborn dog! I didn't know that! Congratulations. What kind of dog?

[00:02:33] Esa Nettamo: It's a Labradoodle. It's a bit of a mix of everything. A family dog, obviously. Although it's a bit of a terrorist, I must say.

[00:02:51] Marc Stickdorn: Okay, that's a different story. I'm interested to learn more, but let's focus on your work. I know you focus your work in the Scandinavian region. You're basically all over Scandinavia, right? From Denmark to Finland, Sweden, Norway, and so on. And you've been doing it for a while already. But when you started your events two and a half years ago, you'd been in this community for a much longer time. How did you get into service design, into journey management? What's your own story?

[00:03:27] Esa Nettamo: So my background is actually in interaction design. When I started in 2000, I started as an interaction designer. I was working in an in-house role at Nokia, Nokia Mobile Phones, and Nokia was doing everything right by the book. So we were actually using user-centric design methods early on, doing a lot of research and applying that research when we were doing actual designs.

[00:03:55] Esa Nettamo: Then, many, many years later, I was running a design agency. It was primarily started as a digital design agency, but then we hired our first service designer. I went through a number of different conversations with her, like, what's the difference between user-centered design and service design? I was kind of challenging her: come on, there's no difference here, it's just renaming the same thing. I remember those times. That was, I think, 2013, 2014, around that time. So that's how I got into service design, and I never looked back.

[00:04:39] Esa Nettamo: But then, I was working on the agency side and we were doing a lot of these customer experience vision works and strategy works for our clients. And then I started to realize that working as a consultant, doing these kinds of projects for them, is not really setting them up for success. They were failing after we walked away. They really struggled with implementing that in their organization. We had to find a way to actually start thinking about how you can actually transform the whole organization around journeys. That's how I discovered journey management. This was around 2021 or 2022, when we started refocusing on journey management.

[00:05:30] Marc Stickdorn: Great. Oh yes, that is the traditional handover problem we have, right? It's one of those effects of a traditional agency model, where the agency is doing something, and then you deliver a journey map, a blueprint, whatever, and say, now you just have to make it real. And yes, it never works like this. So I feel the pain, and I also see how the model in agencies has been changing over the last 10 years. Now agencies work way more embedded, right? And work together with the client instead of delivering something for the client. And that's the reason why, because handovers never work.

[00:06:12] Esa Nettamo: Yeah, but I would say that it's also a wider problem. It's not only for agencies, because I see the same problem in in-house teams as well. They really struggle with making the impact within, and influencing the other parallel organizations and silos.

[00:06:32] Marc Stickdorn: And that's what you're working on basically in your day-to-day job now, right? Because you also switched from, let's say, an agency model to, how do you call it? Building capability in an organization?

[00:06:49] Esa Nettamo: Yeah, one big change was when I switched from the agency side. Well, I'm still a consultant, so still on the agency side, but it's a different approach. How we work is not really about us doing a project for you. It's more that you need to have the capabilities within, so you need to have the people inside, and then we work with you and really help you to actually implement that. And when we walk away, you have already been trained and everything is set to go. So I don't really believe anymore in this, that an agency comes and delivers the project and then that's a success. That's not going to be the successful approach for something that requires a transformation in an organization.

[00:07:35] Marc Stickdorn: I still see it working if an organization has a good in-house team and they need help in a project, and they need more people maybe, or different brains to work with. But I think the fundamental difference is the organization is still leading the thing. They own the data, and they also build up this implicit knowledge that is often undervalued in a project, but it's so important. If we look at a journey map, only a fraction of the data we actually act on is written in the map or somewhere included in the map. There is a huge amount of knowledge implicitly there when you're working with this map over a longer time.

[00:08:24] Marc Stickdorn: So, yeah. When you start to engage with a new client, walk us through how this works. What does this look like?

[00:08:34] Esa Nettamo: Hm. So how we usually get into these consultancy engagements is, well, first of all, our events pull in people who are so-called believers, as you saw in Stockholm. We have a lot of people coming from a design background and a customer experience background. The challenge they often have is that they still need to sell it within. So they buy into this whole thinking of journey management, but now they need to sell it into their organization. So usually how we start is that we organize almost like a mini event for the organization. We go and we talk about journey management. What we try to do is give as much value upfront, so that the team who is trying to get it approved in their organization has the tools and our support in getting there.

[00:09:21] Esa Nettamo: Then, when we start, and this is something where I also changed my approach quite a lot in the last year or so. When I started with journey management, first of all I thought, okay, you have to map all those journeys, that's a lot of work. Will there ever be a return on investment on this thing? But then when we started working, I realized, okay, different levels, you don't need to map everything. But still there was a lot of focus on "let's build the fundamentals first", so you have a scalable foundation which you can later on start scaling.

[00:10:00] Esa Nettamo: But what I realized was that it takes too long for us to deliver any outcomes with that approach. So now what we are usually doing is trying to identify a business problem or objective, and then we use journeys and journey management to actually deliver on that thing. So we are aiming to always get to the point where we can actually deliver results for the organization, because after you have concrete results within the organization, it's so much easier to start scaling and talking about, hey, how about if we make this actually our operating model, rather than just the project that we did together now?

[00:10:43] Marc Stickdorn: Fantastic. If you talk about results, what kind of results are organizations looking for, or are you promising them?

[00:10:56] Esa Nettamo: And that's also something where there's a different kind of thinking around it. Like, what should we really go for? Of course, what you'd love to offer is that there would be new revenue coming in, that kind of result. And of course, sometimes that is exactly what we are trying to get. But in reality, the easiest way to promise something that you can deliver on is to look for ways to improve internal organizational efficiency. Like, how can we improve the internal operations, so that when we do the journey mapping and we identify how we actually deliver that service experience for our customers, what are the ways for us to actually improve on this?

[00:11:45] Esa Nettamo: At our last event in Malmö, we had Simon Bach Peters from Nordea Bank talking about how they worked on the onboarding journey for business banking. Their goal was to go from 30 days of onboarding time to 10 days within the first year. And that is, of course, a customer outcome that they are aiming for, but as a side product, they improved internal efficiency by 190%. And you can just think about it: you are the business leader and you're going, okay, our customers are getting in faster, they are happier, that's great. But if you go and you say that we are actually saving this much money because we are so much more efficient, it's so much easier to justify things when you are also telling that story.

[00:12:38] Marc Stickdorn: Absolutely. And that actually already has a direct impact on revenue, because having customers active 20 days earlier is quite an impact. So that's a great start indeed.

[00:12:53] Esa Nettamo: Yeah.

[00:12:56] Marc Stickdorn: Let's start there. At your last event, you reflected a little bit on your story, on the events you've done. And you shared some slides about that, and I thought that was really interesting to see how the topics in these events actually changed over time. And then you also reflected on where organizations are, so kind of a maturity model. Because that's also driving the questions they're having, and it actually correlates with what kind of presentations you see at these events. Would you like to walk us through that?

[00:13:38] Esa Nettamo: Yeah, I'd be happy to do that. So the benefit, first of all, is that for the last two and a half years I've been solely focusing on journey management. I told the story in an opening monologue that I only talk to people who are really interested in journey management. My family is an exception, but the relatives are on the borderline: will I talk to them if they're not really interested in journey management? And the benefit of that is that I get to talk to hundreds of people within a year and hear their stories, what they are struggling with, what the success cases are. And then of course, through my own consulting, we also work only with people we are helping with journey management.

[00:14:26] Esa Nettamo: And again, what you see here is me reflecting on the two and a half years of running JourneyOps and how the conversation has changed over time. When we started, in January 2024 in Helsinki, that whole year was really about just educating the market: hey, there is this thing called journey management. And back then I was still going after the idea that it should be called JourneyOps, journey operations, rather than journey management. But we can go into that topic later on. I basically lost that conversation. But nevertheless.

[00:15:08] Marc Stickdorn: We all did.

[00:15:09] Esa Nettamo: Yeah, we all did. So it was a lot of bringing people to tell case studies: this is journey management. We talked about triple diamonds and how it is really important for us to actually focus on the first diamond, and that's what journey management really helps you with.

[00:15:31] Esa Nettamo: At the same time, there was a lot of a boom in journey management platforms, like Smaply, for instance. You guys started to surface the shift from traditional customer journey mapping to journey management. And of course you had been doing that before already, but now it really started picking up awareness, at least in the Nordics. And then the end of 2024 and most of 2025, everybody was talking about: so what is the right tool for us? When I had conversations with people, they immediately turned into this: so what tool should we get? And it felt like you needed to have a journey management platform to be able to do journey management, or even to be able to start with journey management.

[00:16:21] Esa Nettamo: I must admit, I was a bit frustrated, because first of all, getting the tool is a really difficult task for a large organization. And if you rely on that to make you successful, you're going to see later on that you will fail. It's an important part, and it helps you to scale, but it's not enough if you just focus on that.

[00:16:44] Esa Nettamo: And actually, I'm really happy, if you look at the last 12 months or so, the conversation has shifted. We have a lot of organizations who started in 2024, 2025. Some of them succeeded, but there are also many organizations who didn't succeed. And now they are realizing, and many people who are even starting now are realizing, that actually it's more about how we get the rest of the organization on board with journey management. And the discussions have been more on: okay, how do we drive the impact? How do we get the other organizational silos involved when we are starting with journey management pilots?

[00:17:26] Esa Nettamo: That has been pretty much the focus for this year. And actually the focus of our last event, in Copenhagen and Malmö, was transformation. How do we actually transform the organization so that we can actually implement journey management? And all the presentations we had there were talking exactly about that. Really nice presentations from the likes of Simon Bach Peters or Lewis Kampman, telling the stories of how you drive business impact, and how you survive when there are organizational changes. So those are really valuable lessons.

[00:18:04] Marc Stickdorn: That's fantastic. I really like how these topics evolved over time. I always say journey management is 90% people and 10% tooling. And with tooling, I mean journey maps in general, not only the software you're using, but also how you structure maps and so on. That's really just 10% of it. The magic is not the tool. The tool is an enabler. It's like if you want to build a house, it's not about the hammer, it's about people who can use a hammer to build a house.

[00:18:41] Marc Stickdorn: And we see the same there. I saw journey management being effectively deployed in an organization running on tools that were really not made for journey mapping, and it worked. And if you think of the history of it, we started our software in 2013. We added all the basic elements you need to run journey management in 2016, like linking maps into each other, connecting to outside data, pulling data from spreadsheets and showing it in the journey map, connecting to Jira, showing the tasks you're doing and stuff like that. It still took five, six more years until it really picked up. So it's not so much about the tooling, and we shouldn't develop a fetishism about tooling where we say the tool is the magic thing. No, it's not. It's the people who are running it.

[00:19:42] Esa Nettamo: Yeah, of course, you still need tools eventually to run it, although I have seen some cases where they are scaling to quite a large extent even without tools. But then it's a lot of manual work, and it's really difficult to keep the journeys up to date. And like you said, for instance, connecting all the different data sources, which makes it interesting for the rest of the organization. If you do it manually, it's a lot, a lot of work. So there is a place for tools. But you shouldn't think that we just get the tool and then we're done.

[00:20:14] Marc Stickdorn: Exactly. Yes, that's the failure. That will hurt quite a lot. So first of all, thank you for kicking off JourneyOps in 2024. It was the first conference on the topic. That was fantastic.

[00:20:32] Marc Stickdorn: If we look at the naming, I called it for years journey operations, or journey map ops, or anything like that, because I saw that companies are struggling just because of the name "management". Bringing in journey management, people are afraid: oh, of course, another management buzzword, and I will lose power, and I need to change the way I'm working. All the fears people have. Still, I think it's okay if we as a community call this journey management, but I also see that every organization I work with gives it their own twist, to call it in a way that resonates in their organization. Since you call your events JourneyOps, but you also talk now about journey management, what's your take on the naming?

[00:21:26] Esa Nettamo: Yeah, I agree. Journey management as a term is really difficult when you're trying to get the rest of the organization involved. If you come from a design or customer experience point of view, and you go and talk to your colleagues who are in product management, for instance: hey, we have this thing called journey management, you should really buy into this, forget about what you are doing and let's just start applying journey management. You're going to hit resistance, and that resistance can derail your whole initiative.

[00:21:59] Esa Nettamo: So that's why I really pivoted more towards the journey operations side. It is really an operation. It's not an all-encompassing management model. But then again, the rest of the industry really wanted to go with journey management. That's what it's called. And that's why we also talk about journey management, because if that's the term that everybody understands, then we'll go with that one. But I still have clients with whom we are using JourneyOps as a term. And in Finland, in the public sector, we even translate it into something that is quite a horrendous term, because in the Finnish language everything is longer, like in the German language.

[00:22:48] Marc Stickdorn: Yes, it's even hard to read sometimes. Yeah. I admire you for that. How's it called in Finnish? I'm curious now.

[00:23:01] Esa Nettamo: Well, in the public sector it's called polkujohtaminen, which is a direct translation of journey leading, leading journeys. It's a horrible term. It's not catchy.

[00:23:16] Marc Stickdorn: But I guess in Finnish it makes sense. For us it's just, yes, raising a lot of curiosity. Which sometimes might actually be a better term, because then people get interested and ask, what is it? Tell me more about it.

[00:23:34] Esa Nettamo: Yeah.

[00:23:36] Marc Stickdorn: Alright. You also talked about maturity levels and how organizations evolve over time. Like, where do they get started? Because if you look at the topics in your events, it kind of correlates with where organizations are. And you see at the high end of maturity, now they're talking about operating models and so on. How can you run journey management as an operating system in your organization for customer experience? Can you talk us through these different levels that you are seeing there?

[00:24:09] Esa Nettamo: Yeah, I can show you a few slides about that, how we structured the maturity model. So what I have observed, when we start discussing with organizations, is that there isn't a single organization I have talked to who hasn't done journey mapping at some point. Typically it's been done in projects. You do customer research, then you map the journey, you define the personas, and then you use the journeys in workshop settings. So you have those beautiful wall-size journey maps, and you get a diverse group of people in front of those, and they brainstorm ideas on how to improve the customer experience and the business outcomes.

[00:24:59] Esa Nettamo: And everybody who participates in those workshops typically stays quite happy with the whole tool. Everybody appreciates the tool. The thing that happens after that project is that the paper gets rolled up and put somewhere in storage, or if it's in a digital format, it's in somebody's digital cloud drive and nobody's looking at it afterwards. And it's definitely not kept up to date, and it's only reflecting a small part of the experience your customers are going through.

[00:25:33] Esa Nettamo: Then at some point somebody starts to think: everybody's really happy about using these journeys in these workshop settings, and it is a good tool for us to understand the context and the experience customers are going through with us, and also beyond our reach. How about if we start actually mapping the whole end-to-end experience? And then they start thinking about, okay, what is the end-to-end experience? And they realize there are a lot of different journeys that our customers are actually going through, and different levels. Some of them are on quite a high level, omnichannel journeys, and some of them are really micro-level journeys, almost like task flows. How about if we start mapping all these journeys and start looking at what our customers really go through? And they focus on building the connected journey atlas, or journey hierarchy. That's another one where there's a debate on what the naming should be, but let's not go there.

[00:26:31] Esa Nettamo: Then once you start mapping those, you also start thinking: it's a lot of work to actually map these things, and how do we actually keep them up to date? And that's when quite often organizations start to think that maybe we should actually start using dedicated software for this. And they start talking about journey management platforms, like Smaply, for instance. And the game changes here a bit, because now suddenly the tool itself enables you to connect customer experience metrics, but also business metrics, to those journeys. Instead of having journeys that were reflecting the customer research done at a certain moment, they are now evergreen. They keep updating all the time. So the data will show how well we are performing on these journeys. And you can start using those to actually pinpoint: these are the journeys we need to focus on, and these are the journeys we are doing well on, so we don't need to focus on those. And it also enables us to pull the data from the journey and start looking at that data on a group level.

[00:27:46] Esa Nettamo: But that's still just scaling the understanding of your customers. So if we talk about journey management, it's not really managing anything. We are not really driving impact, we are just understanding the customer: this is the experience they're having. But how do we actually make a difference? And that's where we start moving into the management side. In order for you to actually succeed in making the impact in your organization, and eventually deliver that to your customers, you need to really address how we drive these insights and opportunities that we get from these journeys through the decision-making forums, and start making decisions.

[00:28:26] Esa Nettamo: And there are two aspects that usually start to emerge here. One is that if you look at the omnichannel, macro-level journeys, you realize that nobody's actually owning those journeys. There are a lot of different silos taking care of part of the journey, but nobody is really looking after the whole journey. And that's where you can start employing journey owners, or journey coordinators, or journey managers. There are a lot of different terms for this, but essentially they are the equivalent of a product owner, but for journeys. So instead of just having product owners owning products, you now also have journey owners who look after the whole journey. And then there are other roles, often a journey ops lead or journey management lead, whose focus is a bit similar, if you have worked in an organization where you have a design ops lead. They make sure that everybody is working in the same way, and they constantly mature the way of working.

[00:29:31] Esa Nettamo: But then, besides having this ownership covered, you also need to focus on how we drive decisions. If you look at large organizations, there's no one way to make decisions. There are different pockets with different rituals for how to actually do decision-making. But now your job, in order to actually push through these changes in your journeys, is to be able to tap into those decision-making forums and drive different opportunities through, so that those changes get approved. So now you should focus on how we are making decisions today, and how we integrate into that. The good thing about journey management is that it's not going to go there and say, hey, stop the press, stop doing what you're doing today, now we use this process. Because all the things we do in journey management precede the decision-making. We prepare a lot of things for the decision-making. So it's fairly easy to integrate with any kind of process you have today. It's just a few steps before, so that the decision-making actually becomes data-driven.

[00:30:41] Esa Nettamo: And this is the level that most organizations aim to go for. You have this layer of journey owners who sit on top of the different organizations and silos, coordinating the work and the impact into decision-making. And that's how you drive the change in the organization, so that you actually deliver the value for the customer and for the business.

[00:31:02] Esa Nettamo: But there are also organizations who have taken the next step. What they do is reorganize the whole company around journeys. It sounds like a lot of change, and it is a big change, but there are a lot of benefits to this as well. Because at level four, what the journey owners are struggling with is that quite often they circle around: do we have the mandate to go and say, hey, these are the things we need to prioritize? So you need to be really good at selling your ideas to those different organizational parts. Whereas at level five, all the resources and people are aligned around the journey. So instead of trying to get other people to make decisions for your journey, you already have those resources around that journey. And what it does is speed up the decision-making. If you are aiming for certain business outcomes, or certain customer experience outcomes, this is the highway for doing that. But it's difficult to get there, and it definitely requires top management buy-in.

[00:32:17] Esa Nettamo: And the one last thing I always want to emphasize is that this is not a quick win. It's not something that you can just do like this and it's done. It takes 12 to 18 months just to get to this management part. Even though we preach that you need to start small, so you shouldn't start mapping everything, it is still a transformation, and it takes time for you to get there. But yeah, that's the maturity model.

[00:32:49] Marc Stickdorn: Thanks for sharing. I think that's great. If we follow this maturity model, I know there are loads of listeners here who are interested in journey management and ask, how do I get started? What are your tips? If an organization does occasional mapping, they might do mapping on a workshop level, maybe even on a project level, what are your five tips, or however many you would like to share, on how to get started with this?

[00:33:22] Esa Nettamo: We had this discussion the other day in our JourneyOps biweekly session, where we were discussing how you actually do that. And one of the conclusions is that there's no one way to do it. It really depends on your organization, where you are, how mature it is. Have you been using journeys before? Do you have top-down buy-in?

[00:33:45] Esa Nettamo: But nevertheless, the number one thing that I preach is: don't try to sell journey management, not to start with. Try to find the business challenge or objective that your organization has already decided is an area it really needs to focus on. So instead of trying to bring in additional work for the organization, position yourself as: we are actually coming here to help you, let us help you succeed with this one. And we help with that by understanding the customer and driving, from the customer point of view, what the things are that we should actually be building. So that's number one: find the business problem that you can support with journey-based work.

[00:34:33] Esa Nettamo: The second one, and this is especially for our Nordic audience, is something we are really terrible at. Well, I wouldn't say terrible, but we have been groomed, when we were kids, to think that you do the work, you do hard work, and when you have done the work well, it will reward itself. So don't talk about the work you are doing, just keep doing the work, and then when you are successful, everybody will love what you have done. Doesn't work. Not in reality, even in the Nordics.

[00:35:08] Esa Nettamo: You should start talking about the journey-based approach and journey management. You don't have to force it on people, but you can organize internal webinars. I've seen organizations who have worked with HR to develop HR skills, so anybody can train themselves to a basic level of journey management. So use that approach too: let's raise awareness. And we have been doing that now for a few of our clients, where, when we are doing the project, we are also building, let's say, a Confluence page where we document: this is journey management, this is what we are doing. And at the end there's always a call to action: if you are interested, reach out to this person and we'll help you get started. It's surprising in a large organization how often people reach out: hey, we are doing this project and it sounds like this might be suited for it, can you come and talk to us? So that's another thing you should do: focus on the training of the organization and talking about it. And there's a really good example of this from organizations, especially in the US. I know one of them, at least, who has done a lot of work on this and succeeded.

[00:36:26] Esa Nettamo: Then the third one is: don't fall into the trap of "this is our thing, we'll do the pilot within the CX and design team, let's not involve anybody else". That's almost 99% failure right there when you do it that way. I really encourage everybody to bring in people from the other parts of their organization from the get-go. So if you have a journey you're working on, find people on the product management side, on the business side, who are really connected, whose interest it is to improve that area. Bring them along, because you can't make any change in your organization by yourself. And let's face it, for us designers, what we need to become better at is using our empathy towards the rest of the organization and not just the customers. Get them involved, because that's how we make the difference in the end.

[00:37:28] Esa Nettamo: So those are maybe the top three. I have this seven-point model with do's and don'ts, but those are the things I would highlight.

[00:37:38] Marc Stickdorn: That would be fantastic. Thanks for sharing. I think that's really helpful, and you hit on a few really interesting points there. I have two follow-up questions on that. The first one is, if folks get started with that, what is a moment they should look out for? A moment they can celebrate, where they see, yes, it's resonating with the organization? What are the moments they should aim for and also be aware of, so they don't just overlook them, but actually become aware of them and say, yes, that is the moment we were hoping for?

[00:38:15] Esa Nettamo: I guess, if I just look at when it really felt good, and also the stories I've heard: if you start the transformation and you're preaching, this is what we could do and this is how we could do it, you have a lot of people who listen, and some of them are nodding and saying, yeah, that's interesting. But the moment when you actually get invited, so somebody reaches out to you and says, hey, we heard you talk about journey management and we saw what you did over there, can you come and help us with that? That is such a great moment, because, let's be honest, you can't really force anybody to do journey management or use journey management. So pushing string through a keyhole is really challenging. But when there's somebody who's actually pulling you in, hey, come and help us, that's the moment where you know that you have succeeded.

[00:39:19] Marc Stickdorn: Awesome. And my second follow-up question then is, we talked about moments to celebrate. What are the moments to be aware of and look out for? What are the threats that might happen, so maybe you need to steer around them, so you see them coming and don't get overwhelmed when they're there?

[00:39:41] Esa Nettamo: One of those things is reorgs, when the organization gets shifted again. And the cycle of organizational changes feels like it keeps getting shorter and shorter. So if you are now in a position where you have your sponsor, and then you have your pilot project, it might be that in a couple of months' time there's a change in strategy and your sponsor might not be there anymore. She might be in a different position, or might even leave the company, and you're faced with a new organization.

[00:40:19] Esa Nettamo: And I talked to one of the Nordic banks. They spent two years building journey management from the ground up. They built the foundation and scaled it to quite amazing levels. Then there was a reorg, and the new supervisor asked: can you show me the business outcomes? And they hadn't been keeping track of that. They didn't think they had to do that. And because they didn't have that data, the whole initiative was deprioritized. A reorg is definitely the kind of moment you need to be prepared for, because it will happen. Eventually it will happen, and you need to be really aware of how you are actually going to tackle that.

[00:41:05] Marc Stickdorn: That is a great point. And I know examples where teams were aware of an upcoming reorganization and actually used it to their advantage. Because what happened then was the team was broken up and they ended up in different departments. And what they did then was multiply. They started different initiatives in different departments and started to connect again, which I think is a fantastic way to turn a threat into an opportunity to multiply and scale.

[00:41:37] Esa Nettamo: There is a really good presentation from our last event, you can check it out on our website, from Lewis [surname unclear], where they had a really good position in the organization, quite high up, and then suddenly they found themselves at quite a low level. How did they actually go on from there? I really recommend checking that out. Interesting story.

[00:41:58] Marc Stickdorn: That's an interesting point. So if people want to learn more, I know you publish all the talks from the event series. How can people find this, and how can people find you?

[00:42:13] Esa Nettamo: Yeah, so our goal is to raise awareness, so we make everything available for everybody. We have these events which pull in around 100 to 150 people, and then you can find all the talks later on on our website, journey-ops.com. Journey-ops.com is the place where you can find all the presentations. We also have the JourneyOps Circle community now. So if you are interested in joining that one, being part of the global community of journey management practitioners, we are now running the beta. Feel free to reach out to me. LinkedIn is probably the best way to get hold of me, that always cuts through the noise. Connect with me on LinkedIn and then I'll get you set up.

[00:43:02] Marc Stickdorn: And we'll make sure to add those links down here in the comments as well, so you can just click on them if you want to connect with Esa, watch some videos from a JourneyOps event, or join one of the next events, because I know Esa is already working on some more in the future. Is there anything else you would like to say? Anything we didn't cover where you say, that's the thing I want to get out?

[00:43:33] Esa Nettamo: I think we covered quite a lot of topics, so thanks for the interview. It's been a real pleasure.

[00:43:39] Marc Stickdorn: Great. Well, thanks for joining. I think that was fantastic. And I'm looking forward to having you back, maybe after a couple more events, and seeing how this has evolved even more over time. Thank you so much for joining, and see you soon.

[00:43:54] Esa Nettamo: Thank you. Bye bye.