In some ways, April was just like any other cbusdaw meetup: interesting content, 40-50 digital analytics folks, great questions and community. But pretty different in other ways, as this was our first ever virtual event!

Thanks to our speakers Monica and Anthony Weiler from Stratos Innovation Group as well as all of our participants for joining us in this experiment. We had a good time and hope other attendees did as well, please reach out to us if you have any feedback.

We had many regulars show up as well as people from all over: Florida, California, and even a strange far away place where everything is so different yet somehow familiar… Michigan. Oh, and someone from Australia was there too.

Most importantly, we’re all here to learn about interesting topics, and Monica and Anthony delivered on that. They explained both what customer journey mapping is as well as how the principles of service design fit into this kind of practice. Ok, and they showed us a lot of really cool looking maps.

Seeing the beautiful and detailed customer journey maps that Stratos creates is impressive, but how the heck do you get from some basic usage data and knowledge about your customers (that probably sits in a bunch of different silos) to something like that?

Monica and Anthony walked us through their approach, bringing in lots of different disciplines including: psychology, human factors design, and traditional behavior analytics. Their holistic approach blends hard data along with many harder to directly quantify factors… an art form not unlike many forms of data storytelling.

Do you need a PhD in Integrated Systems Engineering specializing in Human-centered Design, Customer Experience and Organizational Change Management (yes, that’s what Monica’s degree is in) to do this work? Well, we’re sure it doesn’t hurt, but no! Monica and Anthony have helpfully provided some additional resources to start getting your feet wet in the form of a free ebook on their site.

They have also provided their slides! Many of the maps are of course under NDA and left out of this version of the deck, but they have generously offered a walkthrough of these projects if anyone is interested.

Please join us next month, when we expect to be virtually meeting up again in similar fashion — topic and speaker TBA.

If you’d like to speak at an upcoming event (virtual or otherwise) or you have suggestions for a speaker or topic, please fill out our speaker call form here!