Designing Customer Journeys: Mapping How People Find and Love Your Product
Book: Entrepreneurship in the Wild: A Startup Field Guide
Author: Felipe G. Massa
ISBN: 9780262542579
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Chapter 3 helped you figure out if real people need what you are building. Chapter 4 asks a harder question: what happens after they find you? A great product on its own is not a great business. You have to design the whole experience, from the moment someone hears your name to the moment they tell a friend.
Massa calls this the customer journey, and the tool for mapping it is the customer journey map. If you have been doing customer interviews, you already have raw material. This chapter turns that research into a plan.
Charm City Meadworks: great mead was not enough
James Boicourt fell in love with bees at North Carolina State University. He took beekeeping classes, brewed mead at home, and after hundreds of batches landed on a dry, refined recipe that people actually wanted to drink. Not the syrupy stuff on shelves at the time. Something closer to a craft cider or beer.
After graduation he moved to Baltimore and started Charm City Meadworks with partner Andrew Geffken. They knew mead was unfamiliar. Craft breweries had educated drinkers for years. Mead had not. Their pitch: “Mead can be an exciting stand-alone drink.”
They started in a garage with a kegerator and picnic tables. But the real work was talking to drinkers, retailers, and wholesalers. They did not hire a salesperson to learn the market for them. They went out themselves. That choice paid off. They learned how people received the product and how to shape the message.
Many people saw mead as sweet and undrinkable in large amounts. So James and Andrew mapped the full journey: how customers became aware of mead, how they evaluated drinks, how they bought, how they consumed it, and how they shared it with friends. That map drove everything. Farmer’s markets, trivia nights, local events. Educating bartenders instead of just dropping off cans. Eventually a production facility and tasting room with board games and exclusive flavors for regulars.
The lesson is blunt. Perfecting the recipe was step one. Building a business meant engineering every step around it.
What a customer journey map actually does
A customer journey typically runs from discovery (someone has a job to be done and learns your solution exists) through sharing (a happy customer recommends you). The exact phases depend on your product, but Massa offers five common ones:
- Discover - from problem awareness to knowing your solution exists
- Research - comparing alternatives, weighing pros and cons
- Purchase - the checkout moment, online or in person
- Use - actually getting value from the product or service
- Share - advocacy with friends, family, or social media
Each phase is defined by what the customer does, not what your sales team does. That distinction matters. You are mapping their shoes, not yours.
If you are in a multisided market (think marketplace with buyers and sellers), build a separate map for each persona. One-sided excellence while the other side suffers is a common startup failure mode.
The think-feel-do framework
Once you have phases, populate them with three rows:
- Think - what runs through the customer’s head (often written as quoted thoughts)
- Feel - emotional state: frustration, curiosity, excitement
- Do - concrete actions: reading reviews, asking friends, abandoning a cart
A badly designed checkout page might make someone feel frustrated during purchase and never reach the use phase. Positive feelings like excitement can pull people through. Your interview notes should feed this table. Gaps in your knowledge become gaps in the map. Mark those gaps and add questions to your next round of interviews.
Touchpoints: where you meet the customer
Mapping thoughts and feelings is step one. Step two is identifying touchpoints, the channels where you can reach and influence customers at each phase.
Different phases call for different channels. Print media might matter only at discovery. Social media and your website might work together during research and purchase. Email newsletters might carry someone from purchase into use. The point is not to be everywhere. It is to be in the right places at the right times.
Charm City Meadworks did not waste budget on channels that missed their persona. They went where adventurous drinkers and curious retailers already gathered.
When you lay out touchpoints, look for overlap. Sometimes two channels reinforce the same message. Sometimes a channel you assumed was critical turns out to matter for only one phase. That tells you where to spend time early and where to pull back.
Zoom in: the use case demo
The full journey map is strategic. Investors and early adopters often want something more concrete. They want to see value delivery in action. That means zooming into the use phase and building a use case.
A use case is the step-by-step story of one persona interacting with your solution. For a tech product, that might be a live demo or a slide deck of screenshots. Massa uses Venmo as an example: one user requests pizza money, another pays through the app. Simple, sequential, clear.
For a meadery, it could be photos of a new patron’s visit from door to glass. The persona is the star. The story is told from their perspective.
Keep the map alive
Massa closes with practical habits:
- Put the journey map somewhere visible. Sticky notes on a wall. Whiteboard drawing. Invite the team to challenge phases and channels.
- As you add personas, overlay their journeys. Look for overlap and for costly divergence. Serving two personas through totally different channels might not be worth the extra sales.
- Use journey mapping internally too. Have team members map their own workflows to spot inefficiencies.
The map is a living document. Customer preferences shift. Jobs to be done get reprioritized. Your job is to update the map before the market updates you.
What I took from this chapter
This is the chapter where Massa stops letting you hide behind product quality. You can have the best mead, app, or service in your category and still lose because nobody knows how to buy it, use it, or talk about it.
The think-feel-do grid sounds simple. That is the point. It forces you to stop guessing and start naming the moments where customers stall or bounce. Pair that with touchpoint planning and you have a marketing strategy grounded in real behavior, not vibes.
If you skipped deep customer interviews in earlier chapters, this exercise will hurt. That is a feature. The gaps in your map are a to-do list.
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