JourneyLab's Design Principles

We're building the best platform for visualising and managing business strategy. Here's a short note to share how we think about design internally:

1. Build for the people with organisation-level accountability - We're not here to make another supercharged to-do list or business canvas. Our platform is thoughtfully crafted for business users - strategy leads, Chief Strategy or Project Officers (or equivalent), enterprise PMOs, and consultants specialising in these areas. JourneyLab gives you true line of sight across the whole business and the tools to manage them effortlessly.
2. Opinionated software - This is how a platform does the heavy lifting for you. JourneyLab builds in expert guidance from world-renowned practitioners to help you and your teams be more effective. Remember, flexible software lets everyone invent (and reinvent) their own workflows, but creates chaos as teams scale. Decoupling your team- and org-level tools is better for everyone. (You're probably already doing this with PowerPoint.)
3. Follow nearly universal principles - A federating system should be compatible with different methodologies. After all, the only way to make holistic strategic decisions is to consider all initiatives together. 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.
4. Helping you to think, not just do - 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.
5. Simple, yet powerful - 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. Use the features you need, as you need them.
6. Enter once, reuse everywhere - In this day and age, data inputs and reporting outputs should be coupled. 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.
7. Visually delightful - Sight is the most dominant of the human senses. We show things intuitively without overcomplicating them, like nested value streams, timelines, and dependency flows. We take pride in our design, including the use of colours and ample white space, to help you notice and focus on what's important with less cognitive effort. We always welcome feedback from users and experts to improve the platform for everybody.
8. Leverage links - 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 project team to choose and use the tools that make them most effective, instead of force-fitting their workflows into tools that they hate.
9. Responsible data stewardship - We understand the sensitivity of any data related to your strategy. It 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, 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. Don't be fooled.