User Journey Mapping is a powerful tool for defining product scope and ensuring a seamless user experience. In this post we explore how it helped refine the arculus Fleet Manager, from identifying user needs to structuring functionality. By leveraging insights from previous versions, market feedback, and internal collaboration, we built a strong foundation for future development. This article is part of a series on creating value through strong product management—written by Georg Held, Product Manager in the Software Team at arculus.
Why We Turned to a User Journey Map
When the idea of revamping the arculus Fleet Manager came up, we quickly realised that a strong focus on all aspects of product development was essential to building a valuable product. In this context, finding the right product value was a key point of the debate. Additionally, we realised that there isn’t a single typical user of a Fleet Management System for Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs). Conversations with insiders of our legacy software revealed a wide range of expectations on top of the technical challenges of defining the product’s underlying architecture.
As we described in our previous post about product discovery, thoroughly analysing and defining the product's scope, users, and relevant operational workflows would be crucial before starting development. However, we also encountered many opinions on what to tackle first. Therefore setting focus and priorities without sacrificing oversight became essential. Let’s dive into how user journey mapping helped us rapidly advance with defining the scope and prioritising it.
What is a User Journey Map?
The goal of a user journey map is to gain a complete understanding of how users interact with the product throughout its defined stages. More precisely, it provides valuable insights into users' needs, expectations, and pain points—all essential for understanding users’ experiences and analysing operational workflows.
Visualising the entire user flow reveals gaps in the user experience and offers opportunities for innovation. Lastly, it helps us identify all development teams required for specific steps in the process, leading to the distribution of ownership across product development later on. User Journey Mapping is a prerequisite for identifying and designing a seamless product user experience, or in this case a system.
To learn more about User Journey Maps, visit the Yale University Quick Definition website.
The User Journey Map for the arculus Fleet Manager
To get started, we broke down the project process in which the software is typically used:
- End-of-line testing within the arculus AMR production
- Project planning in pre-sales
- Specification phase after customer quote acceptance
- System and field commissioning
- Operations, service & support
In each of these phases we structured the following:
- User
- Scope
- Objectives
- Interaction with the system
This quickly filled a large whiteboard, but also revealed the need for improvements and gaps in user details, especially in how they interact with the system. Through relentless user interviews, the full picture emerged. Below is a simplified version of our initial user journey map:
Since we already had great insights from previous versions of the arculus Fleet Manager and the market, we could quickly map the required functionality and the existing pain points. These shaped our first priorities, which we then refined further. Wireframes and prototypes helped validate hypotheses, leading to better concepts for users to achieve their goals at each step of the process. This resulted in many cards highlighting the specific functionality required.
As a last step, we further broke down the functionality by assigning it to the most relevant product development teams. This added structure and clarified ownership.
Learn more about the development of the arculus Fleet Manager here.
Conclusions and What’s Next?
In general the user journey map is a great tool for understanding users, their goals and operational tasks. It helped us define the product scope and, more importantly, prioritise the key things for an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) of the system. It also guided us in achieving a great user experience.
Finally, the tool itself—we used Miro—allowed us to collaborate efficiently. Based on the feedback we received, we highly recommend user journey mapping for the intralogistics industry. Now and in the future, this framework will remain a living tool for developing new products. It is also the basis for breaking down product ideas by applying user story mapping in each team's backlog.
In the next blog post we will explain the strength of having a well-aligned user journey in getting started with prototyping; precisely with extracting wireframes to collect first user feedback.
