A new customer needed one thing: access for a colleague. To get it they met the website, then a chatbot, then a form that belonged to a different team, then an email from a queue they had never heard of. Each step was owned. None of them owned the outcome. Internally this looked like three successful handoffs. Externally it looked like a company that could not add a user.
The org chart was the information architecture.
start from the outcome
Name the outcomes people actually arrive with. Get access. Change a plan. Understand a bill. Fix something that broke. For each one, write the path as they experience it, including the waits. The boxes on your diagram are not steps. The waits are.
Then give the path a single owner, even if the work crosses teams. Shared responsibility is how a customer ends up explaining themselves three times.
A handoff your customer can feel is a product bug.
one place to see where it stands
They should not have to know which department has the request. They should be able to see what happens next, and what they are waiting on. Internally you can route however you need. That routing is not their job to memorize.
If the only map of the journey lives in a slide, the journey is still organized for you.