Create Clear & Actionable Journeys with the 5x12 Framework

Jul 24, 2025

Tingting Lin, a Principal journey management coach at TheyDo, shares her expertise on journey management. She discusses the challenges of structuring customer journeys, particularly for onboarding experiences. Tingting emphasizes the shift from journey mapping to journey management, introducing a powerful framework for clarity. The conversation delves into the importance of actionable insights over static representations, and explores tools like Miro and Deidoo that facilitate effective journey design. Listeners will learn practical tips to enhance user journeys and simplify complexity.

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ANECDOTE

Complexity in Early Journey Mapping

Marc’s onboarding journey became too complex when translated from Miro to Deidu due to many lanes and unclear definitions.
This complexity caused slowing down as Marc and team struggled to decide where new insights and opportunities should fit.

ADVICE

Simplify with Limited Lanes

Stick to a limited set of lanes like insights, opportunities, solutions, and metrics to simplify journey maps.
Use nested journeys for details instead of overcrowding the main map with excessive steps or lanes.

INSIGHT

Triple Diamond in Journey Management

Journey management aligns with the triple diamond workflow: problem discovery, solution discovery, and delivery.
Tracking insights, opportunities, solutions, and metrics throughout enables better collaboration and progress tracing.

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I have to admit, even I got stuck...

Recently, I was working on the onboarding journey for my Circle community.

What started as a flexible journey inside a Miro board very quickly became a complex map that became impossible to use.

With every new insight we wanted to add came questions about where it should go and how it should be defined. Due to these meta-level questions, we lost momentum, and the entire process slowed to a halt.

Unintentionally, I had created a journey structure that was simply too complex to be useful in practice.

Finding the right balance between structure and flexibility, as well as richness and overview, in your journeys is a challenge many of us face.

That's why it's the next big problem we tackle in our Journey Management Playbook series.

In the past episodes, we've used AI to generate a journey and then verified it to build trust. Now, we need to make it truly manageable.

The core issue is that we often treat journey maps as containers for all information, when their true power lies in driving action.

So, as we've said often, we need to shift our mindset from "journey mapping" to "journey management".

The key is a simple yet powerful framework for structuring your journey.

* What if the most effective journey had a specific, limited number of lanes?

* What if there was a rule for how many steps you should have (maximum)?

* What if there was a simple way to handle complexity without cluttering your main map?

In this episode, Tingting reveals the proven framework that helps you answer these questions.

With this framework, you'll be able to transform your map from a static document into a practical tool that teams can use to make informed decisions.

Heads-up, this is another deep-dive where we get into the nitty-gritty details.

We spend a lot of time sharing our screen, so if you're listening to the audio-only version, I highly recommend opening the accompanying slides to follow along visually.

We've also included timestamps in the description, so you can easily jump back to a specific topic later on.

Be well,

~ Marc

--- [ 1. LINKS ] ---

Playbook Slides - https://go.servicedesignshow.com/08gpl
Sign up for TheyDo - https://go.servicedesignshow.com/scjwb

--- [ 2. GUIDE ] ---

00:00 Welcome to Episode 5

03:00 Meet Tingting: Journey Coach

05:00 Short articles at the end

06:00 Series Recap

07:00 Next Steps: Filling Your Journey

10:00 Action-Biased Journeys

15:30 Simplifying your journey

17:30 Workflow First: Not Just Visuals

19:55 Journey Map Evolution (V1 vs V2)

27:00 Why Fewer Lanes Work

29:10 Triple Diamond Workflow

33:40 Framework Over Flexibility

38:30 Nested journeys

41:20 Lane Owners & Stakeholders

45:30 Offboarding Journey Example

49:00 Automatic Data Roll-Up

50:00 Actionable Insights > Stories

54:15 As-Is vs. To-Be Approaches

1:00:30 Key Takeaways: Structure Tips

1:04:00 Next Episode Preview

1:04:50 Connect With TheyDo

--- [ 3. FIND THE SHOW ON ] ---