Unf*cking Your CX #31: Unf*cking the Customer Journey Roadmap - Stop Guessing, Start Acting

The Customer Journey Roadmap Is Killing Your CX

Roadmaps are supposed to guide your CX strategy. But let’s be real: most are garbage.

They’re born in a boardroom, celebrated with donuts, and buried in a shared folder never to be touched again. Meanwhile, your customers are evolving, your competition is accelerating, and you’re still clinging to a static document like it’s 2019.

And guess what? That “roadmap” isn’t helping you—it’s killing you.

Today, we’re ripping apart the outdated, one-size-fits-all roadmaps and showing you how to rebuild them into living, breathing CX power tools. Tools that don’t just “look good” in strategy meetings but actually drive revenue, loyalty, and retention.

"It's using the journey to plan your initiatives." - ✨Jochem van der Veer , Founder & CEO of TheyDo - Journey Management

Ready to stop guessing and start acting? Let’s do this.

AI Isn’t Magic—It’s Just the Tool You’re Ignoring

Here’s the thing: you don’t need another static roadmap. You need a real-time system—a way to turn customer chaos into actionable clarity.

And that’s where the right tech (yes, we’re looking at you, AI) comes in. Not as some buzzwordy silver bullet but as the muscle behind your map. AI doesn’t replace your strategy—it turbocharges it.

Here’s how:

• It spits out insights faster than your weekly meetings ever will. Late deliveries? Frustrated customers? AI finds the friction points before they explode.
• It makes your roadmap smarter, not harder. Stop tweaking roadmaps by hand. Start letting data tell you where the real problems are—and how to fix them.
• It forces you to act. No more excuses. No more static maps. AI updates your map in real-time with what customers actually need.

You don’t need to shout “AI” from the rooftops—you just need to use it like a damn professional.

Static Roadmaps Are a Liability

Your roadmap isn’t a trophy. It’s a tool—and tools need maintenance.

The Problem: Most brands build their roadmaps once, high-five, and never touch them again. Meanwhile, customers are changing their behaviors faster than TikTok trends, and your map is stuck in the past.

The Fix: Stop making maps. Start building systems.

• Use real-time feedback tools to find friction before customers start rage-tweeting.
• Schedule quarterly “kill your darlings” sessions. Review the roadmap, scrap what’s stale, and update what’s working.

Reality Check: If your map hasn’t changed in 6 months, it’s not a roadmap—it’s a liability.

Who Is Your Roadmap Really For?

The Problem: Most roadmaps are built for your company, not your customers. They’re packed with internal jargon—like “Optimize Funnel” or “Streamline Ops”—that mean jack to the people actually paying you.

The Fix: Flip the script: make it about the customer.

• Analyze real feedback: Use heatmaps, session recordings, and reviews to uncover where customers get stuck.
• Understand the why behind the what? Why did the customer take that specific action?
• Get brutally honest: If your map doesn’t reflect their pain points, you’re wasting everyone’s time.

Pro Tip: AI can pull data from customer surveys and behavior faster than your ops team ever could. Let it do the grunt work so you can focus on fixing the problem.

Post-Purchase Is Where Loyalty Happens

The Problem: Most brands obsess over pre-purchase and leave post-purchase in the gutter. Spoiler: this is why your churn rate is killing your growth.

The Fix: The journey doesn’t end at checkout. Build out the post-purchase roadmap:

• Onboarding: First impressions stick. If your onboarding sucks, your churn will too.
• Proactive Support: Don’t wait for complaints—head them off with delivery updates, personalized emails, and loyalty rewards.

Pro Tip: Use AI to track churn patterns post-purchase. Did delayed deliveries cause churn? Did proactive outreach save a customer? Data doesn’t lie.

"For B2B, post-purchase is very important and it's where many businesses now struggle. f.e. churn: to optimize ppl look at renewal and end-of-life journeys - but in reality there are huge opportunities pre-purchase that influence churn." - ✨Jochem van der Veer

Emotional Touchpoints: The Real CX Game

The Problem: Roadmaps obsess over transactions—purchase, support, return. But customers? They remember how you made them feel.

The Fix: Map the emotions. Where do your customers feel frustrated? Where do they feel delighted?

• Use sentiment analysis to find those emotional highs and lows.
• Address the “moments that matter”—the ones where frustration or joy can make or break loyalty.

Pro Tip: Don’t overthink it. If a late delivery pissed them off, fix your communication. If they felt relief from proactive support, double down.

Emotion builds loyalty. Ignore it, and you lose customers forever.

Tie Your Roadmap to the Bottom Line

The Problem: Roadmaps are nice in theory but meaningless without results. If your map isn’t tied to churn reduction, CLTV, or revenue growth, it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.

The Fix: Every touchpoint needs a business metric. Period.

• Onboarding → Churn Reduction
• Loyalty Rewards → CLTV Growth
• Support → Retention

Pro Tip: Use tools that automatically measure the impact of roadmap changes on revenue. Stop guessing—start tying every stage to dollars and data.

"This can't have enough emphasis. The key here is to load your journey with metrics coming from the sources. It's not enough to name the goal. You have to measure and monitor the KPI(s) in the journey." - ✨Jochem van der Veer

3 Player Tips: How to Turn Your Roadmap Into a CX Power Tool

1. Make It Move: Your roadmap isn’t art. It’s action. If it’s not evolving, it’s not working.
2. Own the Touchpoints: If no one’s accountable, nothing changes. Assign owners—and make them sweat.
3. Measure the Impact: Tie every touchpoint to dollars, data, and retention metrics. No impact? No point.

"We call this the journey framework. A layered approach typically 3 levels: 1. Framework Journeys (f.e. lifecycle); 2. Macro journeys (f.e. Purchase); 3. Micro Journeys (f.e. Buying a mobile phone in store). Some teams have more granularity, but the kicker is: data should  bubble up from the low level journeys all the way to the top. So you know how the friction adds up to bigger pain points that map onto the KPIs the business tracks on lifecycle level." - ✨Jochem van der Veer

2 Frameworks:

Framework 1: The Iterative Journey Roadmap Framework

This framework turns your static roadmap into a living, evolving system that stays aligned with real-time customer behaviors and business outcomes.

Steps:

1. Set Up Regular Reviews: Stop treating your roadmap like a one-time project. Review it quarterly—or better yet, let live data update it automatically.
2. Feed It Real-Time Data: Use tools that pull in live insights from customer feedback, behavioral analytics, and churn patterns.
3. Prioritize Actionable Outcomes: Each update should have clear owners and measurable goals. If a touchpoint improves churn, show it.

Why It Works: It eliminates guesswork and keeps your roadmap focused on what customers need right now.

"We usually see teams have Quarterly rituals for prioritizing initiatives. But nothing on business opportunities. It's business goal → Solution. But not Business goal → Opportunity (from customer experience / journeys) → Solution. Quarterly: Opportunity prioritization across core team leads. Monthly: Journey review (metric review, opportunity creation, new journey data collection initiatives). Weekly: grooming. Adding new research, connecting dots between different teams, updating - etc. Daily: monitoring metrics." - ✨Jochem van der Veer

Framework 2: The Business-Outcome-Driven Roadmap

Stop treating your journey map like an art project—it’s a strategic tool that should drive revenue, retention, and loyalty.

Steps:

1. Tie Touchpoints to Metrics: Align every stage of the journey to a business outcome (e.g., onboarding → churn reduction; proactive support → higher CLTV).
2. Quantify the Impact: Measure the lift after every change. Did reducing friction in returns improve repeat purchases? Prove it.
3. Optimize Relentlessly: Use AI to flag where the journey is breaking and where it’s driving measurable value. Fix the gaps.

Why It Works: It forces you to move from “nice-to-have” CX to bottom-line business impact—and that’s what gets leadership buy-in.

Thought-Provoking Question

When was the last time your roadmap drove revenue—or are you just guessing what your customers need?

Stop Guessing, Start Acting

Your roadmap isn’t dead—it’s just stuck.

Dust it off. Inject some life into it. Use the tools you have (yes, even AI) to make it dynamic, actionable, and tied to real business outcomes.

Your customers are evolving every day. If your map isn’t, what the hell are you even doing?

Let’s unf*ck it.