Transformation is not as simple as just patching up the current customer experience. Most of the time, it involves foundational changes that deliver the customer a fundamentally different experience. Future state journey maps are a tool used to document the vision you want to move toward that, once complete, will inspire the customer love you need.

When a set of future state journey maps is finished, it typically looks like 5-10 primary stories that represent the key customer experiences.

So how do we go about it? Here’s a nine-step process to get it done.

Future State Journey Mapping Step 1: Recruit the Team
It’s important to have a group of at least 4-5 people assigned to draft the future state journey maps, and it’s best to have much larger groups collaborate on them (we typically do workshops of 30-40 people). Find a team that possesses diverse skills, including user experience, operations, marketing, and IT.

Future State Journey Mapping Step 2: Define the Business Outcomes
Before we start ideating, we should get very clear on the specific value-creating behaviors we want from our customers. Value-creating behaviors we want to encourage typically include marketing-related behaviors, purchase behaviors, promotional behaviors, and usage behaviors.

Future State Journey Mapping Step 3: Review Your Research and Current State Journey Map
All your knowledge of the current state should be combined with the robust amount of insight into your customers’ hopes, fears, wants and needs that you gathered while crafting your customer personas.

Future State Journey Mapping Step 4: Look for Ideas Elsewhere and Review “The Art of the Possible”
Ideas for possible solutions to your customers’ points of pain are all around you. Look for inspiration in how your competitors are solving the same types of problems that you documented on your current state journey map. 

Future State Journey Mapping Step 5: Generate Big Ideas and Lots of Ideas
With all that inspiration, the ideas are probably already flowing. Let them out. Write them down.

Future State Journey Mapping Step 6: Prioritize - Evaluate Value and Level of Effort
It now becomes necessary to prioritize which ideas will become part of your journey maps. Factors you should consider include outcomes, cost and level of effort, story value, and moments of truth.

Future State Journey Mapping Step 7: Draft Stories
Now that you have a prioritized set of new ideas, you are ready to start drafting stories. Each story will feature a different persona as the “hero,” as well as lay out a different starting situation. 

Future State Journey Mapping Step 8: Create Pretty Materials
It's tough to get most people engaged in customer journeys that are limited to just written text. It’s more effective to create visually rich materials to convey customer journey stories. One format we have often used is a comic strip layout with pictures and text underneath.

Future State Journey Mapping Step 9: Selling the Vision
It’s not enough to have a clear and effective vision. You have to be able to sell it to your organization. As discussed, having a visually appealing way to tell the story is one important tool. Another tactic is involving key stakeholders in the journey mapping process.

Once you have the overall customer journey defined and have organizational alignment, you are ready to start making that vision a reality, which is the topic of the next section of the book.