Kicking off the afternoon, our MC Marc Fonteijn will host this masterclass on journey management — designed to give you a complete introduction to the discipline, from why it matters to how to make it work in practice. It brings together stories, lessons, and frameworks from leaders who have already walked this path, offering clear takeaways you can apply when you are back at your desk.

Marc will begin by sharing his own journey, moving from service design into journey management, and how he has applied it through the Service Design Show. Jochem van der Veer (TheyDo) will then distill the top lessons from the Experience Edge podcast, highlighting the business challenges leaders face and the impact journey management can deliver when silos are connected.

Next, Jens Scharnetzki (EnBW) will bring product delivery to life, showing how every roadmap item is tied back to the reality of a customer journey — reminding us not to build before we know for whom and why. Florian Vollmer (Autodesk) will follow with Momentum through community, exploring how alignment, value, and impact are created when dispersed energy is turned into collective momentum.

After a short break, Bill Staikos will share the three things executives consistently look for when justifying spend on CX initiatives — and what every practitioner can do tomorrow to be ready. Aude Jacquemin (Lyreco) will then take us inside the changes her team made to embed journey management as a global CX function, reflecting on the process, challenges, and wins.

Mark Smith (Journey Management Institute) will close the speaker contributions with a reminder of the importance of standardization — and the value it brings when workflows and practices are consistent across the enterprise.

The session wraps up with a panel discussion hosted by Memie Huang, featuring Jens Scharnetzki, Florian Vollmer, Aude Jacquemin, and Marc Fonteijn. Together, they will share candid reflections on pitfalls to avoid, practices that deliver results, and advice for building confidence in your own organization.From start to finish, participants will gain practical guidance on how to:

• Frame the case for journey management

• Connect journeys to product, business, and customer outcomes

• Build momentum through people and community

• Anticipate what leaders need to hear

• Embed standards that make scaling possible

This is a fast-track guide to journey management, enriched by stories, lessons, and methods from those already leading the way.

In large organizations, mapping customer experience is no longer enough. To ensure readiness to scale a Journey Management practice, a new hybrid role is emerging: the Journey Operations Lead. Equal parts service designer, product thinker, and business translator, this role brings clarity, accountability, and structure to an increasingly complex function.

In this session, Grace de Athayde, Customer Journey Operations Lead at Pfizer, shares how she’s shaping this role to unify teams, retain knowledge, and move from output to outcome. Drawing on her experience leading journey management efforts at different enterprise organizations, with different setups (including Product-led and in-house agency models), Grace unpacks what her perspectives on the role—from stakeholder alignment and experience governance to AI-supported insight extraction and business reporting.

Whether you’re just starting out or scaling a mature practice, this session offers a practical outlook on embedding the journey ops function into your organization.

Key takeaways

• The Journey Ops role. How this emerging role bridges strategy and execution, combining service design, technology and business thinking and reflections on how the role can significantly change depending on the organizational context.

• How to turn territories into neighborhoods. Explore bottom-up change management elements to drive momentum in enabling teams to adopt Journey Management.

• Explore a 3-step process to enable journey management. How AI structured insight practices are can help enterprise organizations retain and socialize critical knowledge, foster cross-functional alignment, and measure what matters.