Author David Bland — who is excellent at crossing the business-culture meme divide, btw — shared this video with the caption, "This would make an amazing customer journey map."

In high school & college I rode multiple times a week. I worked in a bike store in Tacoma and biked everywhere in Eugene. I have long loved mountain biking and I recently bought a bike, so the video resonated more than when I first saw it. I had done hours of research, talked to several friends, and test rode a few models I was interested in. I agonized over the money I was about to spend. It was anything but straightforward.

David's comment made a connection for me: Hobbies could be an interesting way to introduce journey maps rather than a single purchase. As seen in the video, there's usually research, growth/development, cost tradeoffs, many smaller similar purchases, a few large purchases, and so on — very rarely within the same brand family/ecosystem.

One of the more difficult parts of a journey map is finding the right altitude so that it's representative of the experience without being too complex to understand or too simple to be useful. Depending on the team and journey, they'll map the happy path to a conversion (marketing) or every possible edge case in completing a task (technology).

Either way, they are so focused on their product/service, they tend to neglect touch points they don't own or consider factors they can't control. The issue, then, is that they're building against such a narrow view of the world that they might actually be creating friction rather than removing it. So it's a question of altitude — level of detail — and aperture — width of openness to the outside world.

Introducing journey maps by mapping the experience of a hobbyist rather than a buyer or user might break through the clean, linear bias that often comes into the journey mapping process.