Why you need Journey Portfolio Management: Navigating your Journey Atlas

If your organization has been engaged in customer journey mapping for a while, you may have noticed a familiar challenge, lots of maps that keep multiplying.

Different teams create different maps. Some focus on onboarding, others on post-purchase and others on niche touchpoints such as mobile app experiences. Over time, you can end up with dozens (sometimes hundreds) of maps.

The potential problem of managing multiple journey maps?

• No clear structure – hard to know which maps connect, overlap, or contradict
• No prioritization – every map feels important, but resources are limited
• No shared value – maps live in silos instead of driving company-wide CX improvements

Without a framework, journey mapping risks becoming an activity for its own sake, rather than a strategic driver of Customer Experience strategy.

That’s where Journey Portfolio Management comes in.
 

What is Journey Portfolio Management? 

Journey Portfolio Management is the discipline of organizing, governing and prioritizing all your customer journeys in a strategic way.

Instead of scattered, disconnected maps, you manage them as part of a structured ecosystem, often called a Journey Atlas.

This approach ensures every journey map you create connects to business outcomes, customer needs and actionable improvement plans. It’s about working smarter, not just mapping more.
 

Defining the Customer Journey Atlas

A Journey Atlas (as defined by Forrester) is a strategic tool that helps organizations systematically uncover, organize and prioritize customer journeys.

Think of it as:

• A catalog of all your journeys
• A bird’s-eye view of your CX landscape
• A shared source of truth for prioritization, ownership and collaboration

In the Cemantica Journey Management platform, your Journey Atlas becomes a central hub where you can:

• Map, prioritize and connect journeys at multiple levels (Master journeys, Stage journeys, Touchpoint journeys) with Journey Lanes
• Link them to Personas, Service Blueprints and performance metrics
• Track journey types, progress and ownership through tagging
• Localize global maps for different regions or markets without losing consistency
• Keep teams aligned across departments, geographies and product lines
• Drive action where it counts through Priority labels to helps teams focus on what matters most and align with strategic goals from bottom up and top down

Explore how Cemantica supports your customer journey mapping strategy here.

Why journey mapping prioritization matters 

Not all journeys deserve equal attention at the same time. A CX prioritization framework helps you decide where to focus for maximum business and customer impact. Let's look at how to organize customer journey maps.

There are two key dimensions:

By scoring journeys against these criteria and viewing this taxonomy in your Journey Atlas, you ensure your Customer Journey Management efforts target the areas where you can make the biggest difference.

Download our free "How to prioritize in Journey Management" Methodology Guide that will help you manage customer journey governance across your entire framework, from setting your strategy, organizing your Personas and Journeys and prioritizing Opportunities and Solutions for execution.

The payoff of Journey Portfolio Management

When you implement journey portfolio best practices, you:

• Reduce duplicate effort and eliminate “orphan” maps
• Align customer journey mapping best practices with business objectives
• Create a living, evolving view of Customer Experience across the organization
• Move from journey mapping for its own sake to mapping that drives measurable CX improvements

Want to go deeper?

Our free "Journey Portfolio Management" Methodology Guide provides best practices and steps for creating, organizing and prioritizing your Journey Atlas. It covers:

• Proven approaches and decision-making criteria for prioritizing journeys effectively
• How to design and manage a hierarchy of journeys, from broad end-to-end experiences down to specific touchpoints
• Ways global organizations can combine standardized universal maps with localized variations for markets, regions or products
• Why Service Blueprints are essential for connecting customer journeys with organizational models and strategic goals
• How to evolve your portfolio by mapping both current state experiences and future state improvements
• Practical, step-by-step guidance on bringing these methods to life in the Cemantica platform 

Download the full Methodology Guide here for more detail on customer journey portfolio best practices.

Take a look at the webinar recording of how to use Artificial Intelligence to support Customer Journey Management, and hear from a Cemantica customer on the benefits of gaining time and insights.

See for yourself and contact my colleagues to request a demonstration of the Cemantica Customer Journey Management platform.