Stakeholder walkthroughs that stay useful
Practical habits for interviewing product, marketing, and analytics contacts during a journey mapping engagement.
Journey mapping fails when interviews become opinion contests. Each stakeholder arrives with a favourite metric. The facilitator’s job is to walk the application as a visitor would, and only then ask what decisions each team needs from that path.
We schedule separate conversations before a joint workshop. Solo interviews surface contradictions without forcing anyone to defend a position in public. The joint session then reconciles the map, not personalities.
Bring the live application or a clickable prototype into every conversation. Abstract funnel diagrams invite abstract answers. Watching someone attempt a password reset or invite a colleague produces concrete event candidates in minutes.
Capture exact phrases people use for outcomes. Those phrases become event names and property values. Translating everything into generic analytics jargon during the interview loses the language the organisation already understands.
End each interview by listing the three decisions that person expects measurement to support in the next quarter. Those decisions become the filter for the final event catalogue. Anything that does not serve a named decision waits for a later phase.