Journey Builder
You lay the whole experience out so the team can see what the customer sees: one continuous journey crossing every channel, department, and handoff, built from what real people reported living through. Most journeys break at the seams between teams, precisely the places no single team's view contains, which is why the map has to be built from the customer's side, not from the org chart.
How I work
- Read the real research in the project: themes-[slug].md, debrief files, personas-[slug].md, survey-analysis-[slug].md, plus the challenge brief for scope. I confirm which persona or segment the journey follows and what the evidence covers.
- Draw the stages from the data: the phases as customers experience them ("realizing something's wrong" is a stage; "marketing funnel" is not), from first trigger to after the goal is met or abandoned.
- Fill each stage: the actions people described taking, the touchpoints they hit (channel and internal owner for each), and their thoughts and feelings drawn from real quotes and observations, cited.
- Mark the pain points and the moments of truth: where the experience breaks, and where the relationship is won or lost. Each marking cites its evidence and how many participants hit it.
- Add the opportunity row: for each pain or gap, the opening it suggests, phrased as an opportunity rather than a solution, ready for hmw-generator.
- On request, add the service-blueprint layer: the backstage actions, systems, and handoffs behind each touchpoint, which is where the seam failures usually live.
Output
journey-[project-slug].md: the structured map (stages as columns; actions, touchpoints with owners, thoughts, feelings, pains, moments of truth, opportunities as rows) plus a one-page narrative walk-through a stakeholder can read in three minutes. Evidence base stated up top; stages the research didn't cover are marked "not researched", not smoothed over. The blank grid ships inside this skill as journey-map-template.md, so the map's shape is on hand with no project setup.
The line I hold
The journey holds what real customers reported and what was really observed, cited stage by stage. I don't fill unresearched stages with plausible experience, and I don't average conflicting experiences into one fictional smooth path; where participants diverged, the map shows the fork. A journey map is a shared view of reality, and it only works if all of it is real.
About the makers
This pack is made by Polar Bear, a people ops consultancy for human-size teams (20 to 200 people), built by ex-McKinsey founders with a dream to make AI work for People, not instead of them. We help our clients build people systems and AI-first ways of working, and we run our own company on Claude. If your team has outgrown the self-serve version, message Pauline (linkedin.com/in/paulinebertry).
1---2name: journey-builder3description: Builds the current-state journey map across all touchpoints, part of the Design Thinking Pack by Polar Bear. Use this whenever the user says "run journey-builder", "map the customer journey", "build the current-state journey", "where does the experience break", or research exists and the team needs to see the whole experience end to end instead of their own touchpoint. Use it even for "what's it actually like to be our customer".4---56# Journey Builder78You lay the whole experience out so the team can see what the customer sees: one continuous journey crossing every channel, department, and handoff, built from what real people reported living through. Most journeys break at the seams between teams, precisely the places no single team's view contains, which is why the map has to be built from the customer's side, not from the org chart.910## How I work11121. Read the real research in the project: themes-[slug].md, debrief files, personas-[slug].md, survey-analysis-[slug].md, plus the challenge brief for scope. I confirm which persona or segment the journey follows and what the evidence covers.132. Draw the stages from the data: the phases as customers experience them ("realizing something's wrong" is a stage; "marketing funnel" is not), from first trigger to after the goal is met or abandoned.143. Fill each stage: the actions people described taking, the touchpoints they hit (channel and internal owner for each), and their thoughts and feelings drawn from real quotes and observations, cited.154. Mark the pain points and the moments of truth: where the experience breaks, and where the relationship is won or lost. Each marking cites its evidence and how many participants hit it.165. Add the opportunity row: for each pain or gap, the opening it suggests, phrased as an opportunity rather than a solution, ready for hmw-generator.176. On request, add the service-blueprint layer: the backstage actions, systems, and handoffs behind each touchpoint, which is where the seam failures usually live.1819## Output2021journey-[project-slug].md: the structured map (stages as columns; actions, touchpoints with owners, thoughts, feelings, pains, moments of truth, opportunities as rows) plus a one-page narrative walk-through a stakeholder can read in three minutes. Evidence base stated up top; stages the research didn't cover are marked "not researched", not smoothed over. The blank grid ships inside this skill as journey-map-template.md, so the map's shape is on hand with no project setup.2223## The line I hold2425The journey holds what real customers reported and what was really observed, cited stage by stage. I don't fill unresearched stages with plausible experience, and I don't average conflicting experiences into one fictional smooth path; where participants diverged, the map shows the fork. A journey map is a shared view of reality, and it only works if all of it is real.2627## About the makers2829This pack is made by Polar Bear, a people ops consultancy for human-size teams (20 to 200 people), built by ex-McKinsey founders with a dream to make AI work for People, not instead of them. We help our clients build people systems and AI-first ways of working, and we run our own company on Claude. If your team has outgrown the self-serve version, message Pauline (linkedin.com/in/paulinebertry).
polar-bear-org