Transforming Gov innovation with journey map ops

zip.co

April 2025

Supporting Zip Co. as they prepared to expand their service offering into new international markets.

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Zip is a prominent provider of "Buy Now Pay Later" solutions in Australia and overseas. Their mission is to provide fair and seamless solutions that simplify how people pay. In 2020 Zip Co. were looking at expanding into new markets after acquired multiple buy now, pay later companies with operations in different countries.

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Objectives

I was a Senior Designer at the time, lucky to be surrounded by people who modelled real leadership … curiosity, proactiveness, empowerment and humility. After discussing the power of Journey Mapping with a few Principal Designers (James and Paul), we set on exploring how would implementing Journey Maps Ops could look like in gov.

We knew that our teams are 'masters' of our product and identifying problems within the constraints of it, however we also knew we have a few limitations, with lack of understanding things holistically outside the constraints of our product as a primary one. That itself let to:

Approach and process

Seizing the opportunity

To kick-things of we started by having multiple co-design workshops to unpack what we know and what we don't … what our assumptions are and what would we need to validate.

During the workshops we the first thing we realised was that the "typical" customer journey map or service blue print won't cut it for the context in which our leaders and teams were making decision. We needed to amalgamate them and add lenses that serve higher leadership.

Driving strategic innovation long term needed :

→ Single source of truth for people’s pain points, jobs to be done, and OKRs

→ Tangible artefact for assumptions, story-telling, and influencing

→ provide comprehensive view of our resident’s life journey allowing us to identify areas for innovation and improving people’s interactions with government

Impact

3 x

new market

launches

2 x

pitches for
FAANG orgs

👉 Long-Term Strategic Planning

👉 Building bridges between organisational silos

👉 Value-driven map to identify high impact areas

I worked with Stef for over a year as she supported Zip New Markets in various partnership and launch efforts.

Stef's ability to dig into the why, country regulations, and provide design insights off the back of her research were a great asset. She helped us identify areas that we need to stop and re-think how we present this to customers, how we break down flows to support best in class design. She also is extremely quick in making changes, which proved to be quite valuable in a constantly changing start up environment.

Kristin Perchal

Director of Product, New Markets @Zip