Get the whole team excited to build
The Customer Journey Design Process, or CJDP, is a facilitation framework for turning messy problems into shared opportunities, and getting cross-functional teams aligned, energized, and ready to ship.
Good teams build the wrong things all the time
It happens the same way every time. Designers start designing. Engineers start scoping. Stakeholders start weighing in. And somewhere in the middle, everyone realizes they've been solving different problems. Not because anyone was careless, but because nobody ever got in a room and built a shared picture of what was actually going on.
We were setting out to build a streamlined SBA loan product for small business owners. The ambition was clear. The underlying process was not.
There were multiple customer entry points, multiple customer types, and manual processes that had never been standardized. The customer was being asked to carry a heavy load up front, not because that was the right experience, but because the internal process left them no choice. Nobody had a complete picture of the journey. Which meant nobody could agree on where to start.
That's exactly the kind of problem CJDP was built for.
What CJDP is
The Customer Journey Design Process is a facilitation framework I developed starting in 2020 at Lowe's, built from individual exercises and workshop formats I'd encountered over the years and assembled into one cohesive experience. The idea was simple: get the whole team in the room, map what's actually happening, find where the real opportunities are, and leave with a prioritized backlog that everyone helped build and everyone believes in.
It runs as a single day or a sprint's worth of sessions depending on scope, all in FigJam. It brings together designers, engineers, product managers, and stakeholders. The output isn't a deck. It's four things the team can actually act on.
Every touchpoint, handoff, and pain point goes on the board without judgment. What does the customer actually experience? Where does the process break down?
Problems get reframed as opportunities. For each one, the team asks: what could we improve, what would it be worth, and to whom? Business, customer, and employee value all count.
Every opportunity gets placed on a grid: urgency vs. value. The whole team decides what matters most. No one person owns the answer.
A shared, numbered list of work the whole team built together. Everyone knows what comes first and why. That clarity is what makes the work move fast.
Get everyone looking at the same map
The session started with journey mapping. We put every touchpoint on the board across four phases: getting connected, invited to apply, qualification, and the proposal letter. Lender-side and customer-side, together. The goal wasn't to solve anything yet. It was just to see the full picture, probably for the first time as a group.
What came out of it was clarity. The friction at the entry points became visible. The handoffs that were putting pressure on customers became hard to ignore. And the team that had been working on different parts of this process separately was suddenly looking at the same thing.
Phase headers and structure preserved. Sticky note content blurred to protect proprietary process detail.
Turn every problem into an opportunity
Once the journey map was done, we didn't jump to solutions. We reframed. For every pain point or gap the team had identified, we asked: how might we address this, and what would that actually be worth? The value got evaluated across three dimensions: what it means for the business, what it means for the customer, and what it means for the people doing the work every day.
This is the step that changes the energy in the room. People stop defending their own corner and start thinking about the system together. When an engineer sees that fixing a handoff problem improves customer confidence and lender throughput at the same time, the question stops being whose problem it is and starts being how fast can we fix it.
The structure of a single statement
Every opportunity gets evaluated the same way: a "how might we" framing to keep the thinking open and forward-looking, then a breakdown of value across four dimensions: business, customer, employee, and financial impact.
The format forces specificity. It's easy to say something is valuable. It's harder to say exactly who it's valuable to and why. That specificity is what makes the prioritization conversation real instead of political.
Each column maps to a journey phase. Each card evaluates an opportunity across business, customer, and employee value.
The structure of a single statement
Every opportunity gets evaluated the same way: a "how might we" framing to keep the thinking open and forward-looking, then a breakdown of value across four dimensions: business, customer, employee, and financial impact.
Let the whole team decide what matters
With a full set of opportunity value statements on the board, the team had one more step before the backlog: the priority matrix. Every opportunity gets placed on a two-axis grid of urgency vs. value. Not every problem needs to be solved right now. The matrix makes that visible and lets the team settle it together.
The items that land in the high urgency, high value quadrant become the foundation of the backlog. Everything else gets deferred or revisited. It's a fast, clear, democratic way to turn a wall of opportunities into a direction everyone can get behind.
Items in the high urgency, high value quadrant became the first sprint's backlog.
Leave the room ready to build
The backlog is the finish line. By the end of the session, the team has a shared, numbered list of work that everyone helped create. There's no ambiguity about what comes first or why. More importantly, nobody had it handed to them. The whole room built it, which means the whole room is bought in.
That's the real output of CJDP. Not the artifacts, not the sticky notes. It's a team that's aligned, energized, and ready to move. The design work that follows is faster, smoother, and more focused because everyone already agrees on what matters.
10 prioritized opportunities. The team left the room knowing exactly what to build first.
The hardest part isn't the process
Every time we ran CJDP, someone in the room would raise their hand at some point and say some version of "but what about xyz?" It's a reasonable instinct. People want to make sure the important things don't get missed.
The problem was, when you asked them to say more about it, they usually couldn't. They had a feeling something mattered, but no real detail to back it up. And that feeling was enough to stall the room.
People fear problems they know nothing about. And most of the time, the fear of the unknown is more paralyzing than the unknown itself. The instinct is to wait until you understand everything before you commit to anything. But that's not how good products get built. That's how they get delayed.
CJDP reframes that instinct. The unknown isn't a reason to stop. It's a cheap opportunity to move, learn something fast, and adjust. Building the wrong thing with full confidence is expensive. Building something small, learning you were slightly off, and correcting is not. The teams that shipped the fastest weren't the ones who had the most answers up front. They were the ones who got comfortable treating the unknown as the starting point, not the blocker.
Just build the thing. You will learn more in the first two weeks of a real user touching something than in six weeks of trying to anticipate every edge case in a FigJam board.
Six months later, the SBA Express platform launched
Customer-facing and lender-facing platforms, a new line of business, on time. The numbers below came from work that started in a FigJam board with a team that finally had the same picture in front of them.
The product the backlog built
The SBA Express platform launched across customer-facing and lender-facing platforms in six months. The design system, the application flow, the closing checklist, the loan dashboard: all of it traced back to decisions made in that FigJam session.
The document upload interface, allowing applicants to submit SBA forms and debt schedules directly through the portal.
Once funded, borrowers get a clean, transparent view of their loan: balance, rate, maturity date, and payment options.
The mobile application flow was one of the most direct outputs of the CJDP session. The team had identified that customers were being asked to do too much, too early, with no clear sense of where they were in the process.
The solution was a task-based dashboard that broke the application into clear sections, showed progress at a glance, and let applicants move at their own pace. The journey map made the problem obvious. The backlog made it a priority. The team built it.
"The best design decision I made on this project wasn't a UI choice. It was getting the whole team in a room and building a shared picture of the problem before anyone started solving it."
CJDP works because it treats alignment as a design problem. Engineers know things designers don't. Stakeholders know things product managers don't. The framework creates the conditions for all of that knowledge to surface at the same time, so the team can build something everyone actually believes in.