A Journey Map on the Wall Is Useless. A Shared Mindset Is Priceless.
This wasn't about creating beautiful artifacts, it was a change management mission to force a siloed organization to see itself through its customers' eyes.The Challenge
Here’s a pattern I see everywhere—organizations spend thousands on consultants to create beautiful customer journey maps. The maps get presented to executives, hung on a wall, and then… nothing changes. The problem isn't the map, it's the lack of a shared mindset and a process to act on its insights. I took on the challenge of fixing this by building a journey management capability that was less about artifacts and more about embedding a new way of thinking across the enterprise.
The Mission Was Clear
When you’re already ranked number one in customer experience, as Navy Federal Credit Union consistently is by Forrester, your biggest threat isn’t the competition it’s complacency.
My role as the Vice President overseeing this strategic initiative wasn't to fix something broken, it was to help the best get better. We needed to build a more scalable, proactive, and evidence-driven way to manage their renowned member experience. Our mission was defined by this unique challenge.
Destroy the Silos
My primary goal was to arm NFCU with a unified, end-to-end view of their member journey, breaking down the internal silos that posed the biggest risk to their top-ranked customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Embed a Scalable Mindset
This couldn't be a one-time consulting project. We needed to build a self-sustaining internal capability, training their world-class teams in human-centered methodologies so they could proactively own and manage their member journeys long after our engagement ended.
Turn Insight into Institutional Habit
The mission was to create a living system, not just static reports. We had to ensure the insights gleaned from journey mapping became a routine, non-negotiable part of strategic planning and the product development lifecycle.
The Brutal Reality
“This is How We’ve Always Done It” Syndrome
In a siloed company, getting people to care about parts of the customer journey outside their direct control is a huge political challenge.
The Actionability Gap
The hardest part is always connecting the "A-ha!" moments from a workshop to the cold, hard reality of a Q3 product roadmap.
The Time Scarcity Myth
Convincing leaders to pull their busy people out of their "real work" to participate in workshops required a powerful business case.
Sustaining Momentum
It’s easy to generate excitement in a workshop. It’s much harder to maintain that energy and focus over the long term.
The Approach
You don’t walk into the number one credit union for member experience and tell them everything they're doing is wrong. That’s a recipe for immediate failure. Their success was real, built on decades of superior data-driven decision making and a deep-seated culture of service.
My approach had to honor their legacy while challenging their assumptions. The strategy was one of collaborative disruption. We wouldn't deliver a grand, top-down transformation plan. Instead, we would select one critical, painful member journey and tackle it with their best people. Our goal was to use their own data and their own team members to build an undeniable, evidence-based case for a new way of working, making them the heroes of their own evolution. We weren't there to give them answers; we were there to help them build a new system for finding better answers themselves.
Immersive Cross-Functional Workshops
We curated and facilitated multi-day sessions that brought together leaders from every corner of the business to build the journey maps together, creating alignment through shared discovery.
Community of Practice (CoP) Launch
We established a formal CoP, creating a central hub for sharing best practices, standardizing tools, and sustaining the energy for customer-centric change across the enterprise.
Train-the-Trainer Program
We identified and coached internal champions, equipping them with the skills and materials to facilitate journey mapping sessions on their own, making the practice self-sustaining.
Insights-to-Action Framework
We implemented a simple but rigid process to ensure every key insight from the maps was translated into a prioritized action item, assigned an owner, and tracked in the relevant dashboard.
A Company Rewired
This initiative proves that the most powerful design tool isn't a piece of software; it's a shared perspective. We didn't just deliver artifacts, we delivered a fundamental, lasting shift in how the organization operates. The success wasn't just in the workshops, it was in what happened after.
From Workshops to Widespread Capability
We didn't just run a training program, we built a self-sustaining educational engine.
We personally trained over 650 employees in human-centered design and journey management, then worked with corporate training to embed these methodologies directly into the new employee onboarding process, ensuring the mindset would scale long after we were gone.
From a Community to a Mandate
A grassroots community is good, but a funded department with authority is powerful.
We nurtured the initial Community of Practice, building momentum and proving its value until we could make the business case for its evolution.
It became a formal Member Experience Department, responsible and accountable for managing member journeys and improving service experiences across the organization.
From a Static Map to a Living Dashboard
A journey map that isn't connected to real-time data is just a beautiful poster.
We helped them transform their static journey maps into dynamic, data-driven dashboards.
By integrating qualitative insights with quantitative operational data, we created a living, real-time view of the member experience, turning an empathy tool into a powerful business management system.
Related Work
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