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A customer-centric transformation through shared understanding
When millions of small businesses, and accountants and bookkeepers trust your software with their finances, every customer touchpoint matters. That’s what Xero, the small business cloud accounting platform, discovered as it scaled globally. Although the company’s teams shared the same goal, they were using disparate tools and were at different starting points with varying definitions of the customer journey.
That changed when Xero’s Service Design team used Miro to turn their disparate insights into a unified Customer Journey Framework (CJF) that now serves as one of the company’s keystone documents.
By building and hosting the CJF in Miro, teams at Xero were able to:
- Take an end-to-end customer-centric view of operating a small business and the support of accountants and bookkeepers
- Hold virtual workshops across timezones for both real-time and asynchronous collaboration
- Use a platform that felt more accessible felt more accessible, human and that teams were already using and familiar with
- Spot new opportunities faster by identifying gaps in the product offering
The CJF does more than just align teams. It’s created a shared understanding that’s helping Xero reshape the way it serves small businesses and their advisors, one innovation at a time.
The problem: Complexity slowing innovation
Xero’s global teams share a passion for customer success. But after a period of rapid growth different teams were using different ways to describe how customers interacted with the company’s products and services.
It was a complex task. Teams needed to map and understand the hundreds of ways customers ran their business – from storing documents and paying bills to claiming expenses – and how they intersected across Xero’s platform. But disjointed tools and unclear context meant teams spent too much time trying to understand customer needs before they could actually respond to them.
“We had teams working across a range of different tools, which created too much complexity. Projects were moving quickly, and there were so many dependencies on other teams, but we were spending more time getting aligned.”
Courtney Martyn, Head of Experience Strategy at Xero
What Xero needed was a common starting point – a shared taxonomy and hierarchy of the thousands of different jobs that customers wanted to do, understood through the eyes of a small business. With that in place, they could start to map the different journeys and individual user flows through its products and services, along with the dependencies between them. Most importantly, it had to transform how global teams collaborated – no small feat for an organization spanning multiple continents.
Developing this framework would be a monumental task. It would take significant effort across teams on different sides of the world to catalogue the various user flows and understand how to combine all that information in a way that would actually be useful to 4,000+ fellow employees. Then they had to build, test, roll out, and iterate on the tool itself.
The solution: Designing something for everyone
When Courtney Martyn, Xero’s Head of Experience Strategy, came onboard, one of her first decisions was to use Miro, not only to figure out what the framework should look like for everyone involved, but also to be the place that the Customer Journey Framework should live.
Some key considerations included managing both simplicity and depth, accounting for how each team would interact with the framework, the different formats and preferences, and ensuring it could be easily accessible for all. Making sure to involve key stakeholders up front, from all over the globe, Courtney kicked off the project with a series of workshops to define the parameters of the framework. As teams were located globally, asynchronous collaboration was key.
“We started using Talktrack right away,” says Courtney, meaning teams could leave a video voiceover next to their work to answer questions or provide extra context. “Before, we were having to build boards and have fake meetings just to record instructions. With Talktrack, we could do it directly in Miro and support our global team.” Sticky notes and comments provided even more ways to leave feedback and make sure that momentum never slowed.
The workshops resulted in a series of personas that shaped the delivery of the framework in critical ways. “If you think about an engineer, they gravitate towards a more tabulated view of information that they can manipulate. Whereas other people work better with a more visual representation,” explains Courtney. The framework needed to be suitable for everyone from senior leaders, those in the detail of the data, and all types of people across the business. Miro was chosen for employees who wanted, in Courtney’s words, something “more visual.”
With Miro chosen as the source of truth, Courtney was also able to strike a balance between simplicity and depth. Anybody arriving on the board would see the title of a customer job and a line or two of key information, with more detailed definitions available simply by clicking on the card. “We needed a level of information that wasn’t overwhelming when someone came into the board, but then they can drill down into the body of the card to view more detailed information,” she explains.
The Impact: Faster, Customer-centric innovation
What started as a small-scale test quickly became a company-wide rollout after a senior leader witnessed the framework’s power to drive consistency and fast-tracked it for organization-wide adoption. Finally, employees had a shared tool and understanding that bridged the gap between technical and product teams.
1. A living, breathing framework
The journey to create the CJF was intentionally iterative. Using Miro’s flexible canvas, Courtney’s team could seamlessly switch between unstructured brainstorming and structured outputs, while maintaining a single source of truth. The framework continues to evolve through quarterly updates, driven by research and employee feedback.
2. Beyond collaboration: Sparking innovation
The CJF delivered more than just improved communication – it became a catalyst for innovation and new possibilities. By mapping complete journeys from the perspective of the customer, including unexplored territories, the framework revealed new opportunities and sparked conversations about future prospects. “It highlights jobs that Xero could potentially get into and then we can identify gaps,” explains Courtney. “That becomes a spur for innovation because we’re asking ourselves if we’re going to do that better than anyone else, how would we do it?”
This collaboration transformed not just how some teams in Xero worked, but how they envisioned their future work, creating a more customer-centric cycle of product development that benefits both small businesses and Xero employees.
3. Enabling everyone to put customers’ experiences first
Teams at Xero now spend less time trying to understand the jobs to be done. It hasn’t just changed the way people work; it’s changed the way they think, expanded their perspectives and allowed them to see the customer journey as a whole. Like Miro, the CJF is now a part of life at Xero – and that’s a win for customers and Xero employees alike.
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Credit: Original article published here.
