When you’re building in a fast-emerging category, you learn to live with two truths at once: The market is hungry for a better way. And the market is also skeptical that a better way exists.
That’s precisely why The Forrester Wave™ matters. It’s not a popularity contest, and it’s not a “who spent the most” contest either, despite the myths that sometimes surface in the comment sections.
In a recent conversation, JourneyTrack Founder & CEO Ania Rodriguez and former Forrester analyst Michelle Beeson unpacked what The Forrester Wave™: Customer Journey Management Platforms, Q4 2025 signals to enterprise buyers—and why JourneyTrack’s performance isn’t just a moment, but a marker of where the discipline is headed.
Below are the biggest takeaways from that discussion, plus what current research says about why “journey management” is graduating from a CX nice-to-have to an enterprise growth mandate.
Michelle put it plainly: the value of the Wave is its independent, expert evaluation and the rigor behind it. Forrester publicly outlines that participating vendors provide key inputs like a detailed questionnaire, a strategy briefing, a product demo, and customer references. In other words: receipts required.
Michelle also addressed the persistent misconception head-on: Wave inclusion and placement aren’t “pay-to-play.” The criteria focus on whether a provider meets the inclusion requirements and how it performs across the evaluation dimensions, not whether they’re a client or how much they spend. (Translation: you can’t buy your way into a stronger product demo.)
That matters for CX and digital leaders because the category is crowded, the claims are loud, and the stakes are high. When Forrester’s own 2024 CX Index shows experience quality declining for a third straight year, the bar for “what actually works” gets a lot less theoretical.
Ania described the evaluation process from the vendor side as “pretty intense,” and Michelle confirmed it’s intense from all sides.
The key point for buyers: the Wave is not one data point. It’s a structured look across multiple dimensions, typically including Strategy, Current Offering, and Customer Feedback, designed to give leaders a comparative view of how providers stack up and where each one is stronger or weaker.
Michelle also explained why the graphic is so recognizable: it visually reflects these dimensions (strategy vs. current offering), with customer feedback influencing prominence. That’s precisely why a strong placement tends to resonate in boardrooms: it compresses a complex evaluation into a decision-friendly signal.
Michelle described JourneyTrack as an “all-rounder,” noting how unusual it is to score highly across the full spread: strategy, current offering, and customer feedback.
That “all-rounder” point is more than flattering language; it’s buyer-relevant. Enterprises don’t just need a tool that creates a map; they need a platform that supports how they operate, how they prioritize, and how they prove progress.
Michelle framed it as a “range of different customer needs, both immediate and in the long term.” That matters because most organizations are managing a mixed reality: pockets of maturity, pockets of chaos, and a very real budget conversation happening in parallel.
McKinsey’s 2024 research on customer care highlights the same tension: leaders are shifting from an “overwhelming focus on CX” to a more multidimensional agenda that includes revenue goals and tech transformation, with increasing emphasis on AI-enabled ecosystems.
In other words, leaders aren’t shopping for “journey theater.” They’re shopping for outcomes.
Rather than listing features for the sake of listing features (everyone can do that), Ania connected differentiation back to a consistent theme: intentionality.
#1. Workshop-to-execution continuity
Ania called out a pain many journey teams know too well: doing collaborative mapping work in one place, then wrestling it into a system that can support governance, action, and measurement. The conversation emphasized that journey work can’t stop at “beautiful artifacts” if it’s meant to drive change.
(And yes, there’s a special place in CX heaven for anyone who has ever had to reconcile five versions of the same workshop output.)
#2. AI that reduces friction and increases time-to-value
Michelle referenced JourneyTrack’s “agentic approach” and roadmap clarity, but what stood out was the why: using AI to help teams reveal patterns, align actions to metrics, and increase productivity, not just generate commentary about what’s happening.
That direction aligns with Forrester’s 2024 discussion of how AI is accelerating journey discovery, analysis, and recommendations, and how genAI can help humans interact with complex journey data more naturally.
#3. Storytelling as a capability, not a soft skill
Ania made a statement that’s both painfully true and oddly comforting: “Getting folks to tell a story around the data is hard.”
This is one of the most overlooked bottlenecks in CX transformation. Organizations may have data, insights, and even strong recommendations, but without a coherent narrative, it doesn’t travel. It doesn’t get funded. It doesn’t get prioritized. And it definitely doesn’t survive the quarterly planning cycle.
Ania delivered the punchline with a bit of cheek:
“The era of journey mapping is over… the future… is optimization.”
That’s not a dismissal of mapping, it’s a graduation notice.
More and more, the market is shifting from static journey visuals to continuous journey management, where teams operationalize insights and adapt as conditions change. Moving from journey mapping to journey management means shifting from static visuals to real-time, actionable strategies that can scale and keep pace with the business.
And crucially, this is happening while most organizations are still mid-maturity. Ania noted that many companies are at “low to medium” maturity, with only a smaller percentage truly operating at the high end, especially when it comes to data access (operational data, warehouse access, etc.). That’s an important reality check for leaders who feel like they’re “behind.” You’re not behind; you’re normal.
Michelle’s takeaway: trust the Wave because it’s independent and rigorous.
Ania’s takeaway: the category is moving from documentation to optimization, and JourneyTrack is built for that future.
And here’s the synthesis if you’re a CX, digital, or transformation leader reading this with a budget spreadsheet open on a second monitor:
Choose a platform that can help you move from insight → action → outcome, at scale, because “knowing” without “doing” is just expensive awareness.
Watch the 20-minute video and access a complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave here.
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