Sketching boxes and arrows is easy; building maps that accelerate delivery requires truth and constraints. Start with one customer journey, capture every handoff, and annotate waiting states. Keep steps named with verbs, highlight decision points, and timebox experiments. Then iterate weekly, pruning steps ruthlessly until outcomes become predictably delightful.
Confusion loves fuzzy ownership. Write crisp role statements that describe decisions, not titles. For each step, specify inputs, quality checks, and the exact definition of done before work moves forward. Clear acceptance criteria and visible handoff points lower rework, increase throughput, and protect people from exhausting, ambiguous expectations.
Automate where variability is low and stakes are manageable, preserving human judgment for nuanced calls. Pilot automations in small loops, measure errors, and set rollback rules. When a manual step outperforms, keep it. When the pattern holds, scale it. Let reliability, not novelty, decide your tooling roadmap.