JourneyLab's Design Principles

We're building the best platform for visualising, communicating, and managing business strategy. Here's a short note on the underlying causes and how we design our platform around them to help you operate more effectively:

1. Focused - We're not making another supercharged to-do list. Our platform is specifically crafted for business-level managers and accountability owners - strategy leads, Chief Strategy or Project Officers (or equivalent), enterprise and strategic PMOs, and consultants specialising in these areas. We help you get and maintain true line of sight across your entire business, with tools that fit effortlessly into your workflows.
2. Opinionated - At JourneyLab, we do the heavy lifting for you. We have interviewed and work with global experts, and build in their guidance on best practices to help you and your teams be more effective, not just efficient. This also helps you upskill your teams with proven approaches, not noise.
3. Decoupled - Modern work happens on the modern web. Nearly everything is linkable, from that Excel spreadsheet in your Teams or Sharepoint, to other cloud-based tools like Jira and Miro, to posts and articles from reputable sources. JourneyLab is your front door to all of these. This decoupled approach frees each team to use the tools that make them most effective, instead of force-fitting their workflows into tools that they hate. You can focus on scaling your business while avoiding the chaos that holds your competitors back.
4. Approachable - Just because the work or environment is complex doesn't mean our tools have to be. We break things down into individual modules and steps, helping you focus on one thing at a time. We provide guidance that anyone can follow, from students, to 'accidental' project managers, to seasoned experts. We advocate a lean approach - use only the features you need, as you need them.
5. Universal - The only way to make coherent strategic decisions is to consider all initiatives together. Federating across teams implies your system must be compatible with different methodologies. Digital product development will be more agile. Business improvement might be a little "waterfall". Net Zero efforts need to fit in somehow, as do your DEI and AI strategies. JourneyLab works agnostic of the project-level approaches.
6. Liberating - Critical thinking is one of the most important skills for project professionals. It's a core part of the job (not just the deliverables themselves). JourneyLab doesn't claim or even try to automate this for you*; instead we provide necessary structure and visualisations out of the box, prompt you on potential blindspots where needed, and give you time and energy back - freeing up headspace for thinking.
7. Consistent - You shouldn't need to enter the same data more than once, and once you do, it should be reused everywhere (especially for reporting). If you're still updating multiple Powerpoints manually after every change (and changes are inevitable), your effort is going to low-value work. Renaming a project? It should update everywhere. Adding a stakeholder report? It should flow into portfolio analytics automatically. Capturing a dependency? That other project should see the relationship too, from their perspective, so they can manage things on their end.
8. Beautiful - It's easier to think and talk about things when we can see them clearly (and vice versa). JourneyLab visualises your strategic data intuitively without overcomplicating them, like nested value streams, timelines, and dependency flows. We take pride in our design, including the use of colours, ample white space, and convenient toggles, to help you notice and focus on what's important with less cognitive effort. We welcome feedback from users and experts to improve the platform experience for everybody.
9. Responsible - We respect the sensitivity of strategic information. Your data belongs to you and you alone. We do not access it ourselves, nor share it with any third parties. Our platform is designed with security and privacy in mind, and has multiple layers of authentication and controls. If any future features require sharing data (e.g. industry benchmarking), they will be opt-in only and include an off switch. We will not blindside users by changing our policies in secret.

We'll update this list if anything else comes to mind.

* And no, large language models can't do this.