Customer Experience Mapping

Map the documentary of how customers meet, fall in love with, and grow with your product

Gia Laudi
Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel)

Customer Experience Mapping

"It's the story of how I met and fell in love with your product. It's like this documentary of being out in the world, finding it, realizing that 'hell yeah, this might actually solve a problem for us,' getting that enough value to convince them to keep going to full value realization, to continued value to value growth." - Gia Laudi

What It Is

Customer Experience Mapping is a methodology for visualizing the complete customer journey through the lens of value delivered, not business conversions. Unlike traditional journey maps that focus on touchpoints and funnel stages, this approach centers on customer milestones—the key moments where customers make leaps of faith and receive meaningful value.

The concept was inspired by Airbnb's internal "Project Snow White" storyboards, which depicted the emotional journey of hosts and guests using Pixar-style illustrations. Rather than showing business metrics, these maps showed customer experiences, emotions, and value moments throughout their relationship with the product.

The key difference from typical journey maps:

  • Customer-centric: Shows what customers experience and feel, not what the business does
  • Emotion-inclusive: Captures the emotional journey alongside functional steps
  • Value-focused: Milestones represent value moments, not conversion events
  • Extends beyond acquisition: Continues through retention, expansion, and advocacy
  • Includes the world before: Maps the customer's struggle before discovering you

How It Works

The map divides the customer journey into three phases with roughly six milestones:

Phase 1: Struggle

  • Problem: Customer is out in the world experiencing the pain your product solves. They're using old methods that aren't working.
  • Interest: Customer starts seeking solutions. They're researching, reading reviews, visiting competitor sites, and discovering you exist.

Phase 2: Evaluation

  • First Value: Customer experiences your product's core value for the first time. This is product activation—they see what it can do.
  • Value Realization: Customer achieves their desired outcome. They've hit the critical threshold of engagement and said "hell yes, this is it."

Phase 3: Growth

  • Continued Value: Customer builds a healthy habit. They're using the product at the right frequency with the right features.
  • Value Growth: Customer expands usage, advocates for the product, or achieves outcomes beyond their initial job.

For each milestone, document:

  • What the customer is trying to do
  • What they're feeling (emotional state)
  • Where Airbnb/your product plays a direct role
  • What's happening in their life that has nothing to do with you
  • How you'll know they've reached this milestone (KPI)

How to Apply It

  1. Gather customer research first — Use Jobs to Be Done surveys or interviews with your best customers to understand their journey

  2. Identify your milestones — Default to six or fewer; more complex products might need more, but simpler is better

  3. Create a visual storyboard:

    • Use key frames or illustrations showing each milestone
    • Include emotional indicators (how the customer feels)
    • Show what's happening in their life broadly, not just with your product
    • Make it understandable at a glance by anyone in the company

  4. Define the goal at each milestone:

    • What does the customer need to believe or feel?
    • What value should they receive?
    • What product usage indicates they've arrived?

  5. Map proactive and reactive experiences:

    • Proactive: What do you do to push them toward the next milestone?
    • Reactive: What do you do when they fall off and don't progress?

  6. Create collaboratively — Get buy-in from product, marketing, and CS by building together (like Unbounce did with co-founders from product, marketing, and CS in a room for two days)

When to Use It

  • When onboarding or activation rates are underperforming
  • When teams need shared language around customer value
  • When marketing, product, and CS are misaligned
  • After conducting JTBD research and you need to operationalize insights
  • When building email sequences or in-app messaging
  • When you need to identify where in the journey customers are falling off

Example: SparkToro

For SparkToro's audience research tool:

Milestone Customer State Key Behaviors KPI
Problem Struggling to find non-obvious marketing opportunities Feeling stuck with same tired tactics -
Interest Discovers SparkToro exists Visits website, performs first search First search performed
First Value Sees what the tool can actually do 5+ searches, creates first list 5+ searches AND 1+ list
Value Realization Has organized, shareable insights they can act on Multiple lists, exports data Searches + lists + first export
Continued Value Regular usage habit formed Consistent engagement over time Ongoing engagement frequency
Value Growth Upgraded plan, sharing with team Expansion or advocacy Upgrade or referral

Source

  • Guest: Gia Laudi (Georgiana Laudi)
  • Episode: "Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel)"
  • Key Discussion: (00:14:24) - The Airbnb inspiration story; (00:32:13) - Mapping methodology
  • YouTube: Watch on YouTube

Related Frameworks

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