Best Tool for Designing Journeys

Pretty regularly, I see the question "What's the best tool for designing marketing journeys?" The common suggestions are LucidChart or Visio, but I think it's much simpler: The humble whiteboard.  (In a video call, if you don't have a whiteboard, a large piece of paper taped to the wall will work.)

Journey Design is best done as a group exercise.  A lot of business requirements will surface and a lot of detail that would otherwise be forgotten will organically come up in conversation.  It may only be a first round prototype, but it'll go much quicker than if you just try to gather requirements and then go off on your own and try to draw it in some visual computer program.

Instead, gather people together (in person or virtually) around the whiteboard.  You want people to start talking about the "user experience" - getting business requirements for a journey can be one of the more fun collaborative efforts and is really helpful for uncovering expectations people forgot about.  I think I landed a job once because I did this with the CEO and CTO of a company during an interview. Here are some of the highlights to get people talking aloud:

• How do people become eligible for this journey/flow? (What is the criteria or logic? Do we have the data? Where is it? Do we need to do anything to the data before we can use it? Are there any suppressions? (i.e., groups of people who would be eligible but we shouldn't send, such as someone with an open Customer Service case or someone who is a known hostile customer or an identified cohort which will perform better without the experience, such as whales?)
   
• What happens to a user during the journey/flow? What marketing (emails, texts, ads, direct mail, phone calls, etc.) do they get? What's the timing or cadence? Are there any splits or testing?
   
• How do they leave? In addition to just exiting at the end, can they be ejected early for any reason?  A status change on their subscription, a new purchase, a return/refund. Do we have the data we need to evaluate for that? Are there Customer Service reasons to exit or pause the journey?
   
• What happens to other marketing efforts while someone is in this journey? Is there anything they should be suppressed from? Anything that should be delayed? Anything that needs to appear within the journey as optional content if it happens to the user mid-journey?