Golden journeys are the high value user journeys that are critical to the product/service/business. They vary from product to product, but typically include purchasing journeys and on-boarding journeys. Here's how golden journeys can help you and your team during this Digital downturn:

💰 💰 Golden journeys are money and money is the goal 💰 💰 

• Identify, define and share your golden journeys with the team

• Map your journeys and keep them updated and easily referenced by all

• For eCommerce, quantify these journeys with the WA (who already is)

• User test your golden journeys regularly

• User test any changes to golden journeys BEFORE release

Preserving the UX quality of your golden journeys is paramount - this is core to your product/service and must be maintained before developing new functionality. I cannot stress this enough, this is the difference between good and bad, between success and failure

Action points:

• In your next sprint planning, plan a sprint to review and user test your golden journeys - consider it an audit and review sprint

• Test the journeys with 5-8 people, review and repeat. After about 10-16 people you should have a very clear picture of performance - but you'll get a much clearer signal much earlier (don't stop after 3-4!! the indicator is when you start to see insight plateau - i.e. you're not learning anything new, repeatedly)

• For bonus points, set KPIs or some kind of metric to measure current and improved journey performance - it might be time to complete, it might be errors or UX issues, you decide with your PM and team. Communicating these improvements and what they mean to the bottom line is one excellent way of demonstrating value and being part of the solution, not the problem (i.e. generating value, not costing money)

• It's easy to muck up doing 'discovery' type evaluative work. It's skilled and particularly difficult in a remote first, post pandemic world. Doing evaluative, user testing type work is a lot easier and imho brings vastly better/quicker insight. Just test your golden journeys, you'll learn even if you're doing it really badly.....not ideal but a lot less risky that disco-type work imo. Doing bad discovery work will send you in the wrong direction, and we're seeing too much of that, usually because of an absence of user testing.

If golden journeys aren't part of your team's vocabulary, make it a part starting today. If you neglect your value-generating journeys, you're going to come under unwanted scrutiny and it's not fun. Take care of your golden journeys and it creates the confidence and space to do more, to innovate, to grow....but you have to do the housekeeping stuff as well as the sexy new stuff.

Change your team's destiny and performance right now, start on the golden journey path today!