Customer Onboarding Journey
The code
journey
title New Customer Onboarding
section Sign up
Create account: 4: Customer
Verify email: 3: Customer
section First steps
Import data: 3: Customer
Invite teammates: 4: Customer
section First value
Build first report: 5: Customer
Share with the team: 5: Customer
How this template works
Onboarding is an emotional arc, not a checklist, and the journey diagram is the only Mermaid type that draws feelings: every step gets a score from 1 to 5, and the rendered chart colors the low points red. This template maps a new customer’s first week in three sections, and the finding is built in — the dip at email verification and data import is exactly where real products lose people.
The syntax: journey declares the type, title New Customer Onboarding names it, and section lines split the arc into stages. Each task line has three colon-separated fields: Create account: 4: Customer is task name, score, actor. The score drives the color — 1 and 2 render red, 5 renders green — and the actor is free text, so Customer, Admin, or Support all work. Sections are purely organizational; the scores are the content.
The gotchas: exactly three fields, in that order — a task name containing a colon breaks the split, and a score outside 1 to 5 renders unpredictably. The deeper gotcha is honesty: a journey where every step scores 5 is a happy-path sketch, not a diagnosis. The value of this diagram is the 3s; if your chart has none, you have not interviewed enough users yet.
To adapt it, add sections for later stages such as Expand and Renew, change the actor to map a different persona, or run one file per persona and compare where the dips land. In a roadmap review, read the chart aloud section by section: any step scoring 3 or below becomes a discussion item with an owner, which turns the diagram from a picture into a backlog.
Related templates: the online shopping journey for the consumer version of the same arc, the user onboarding flowchart for the logic without the emotions, and the login flow sequence for the messages behind the verify email step. Full reference: the journey diagram guide.
Variations to try
- Change the actor to Administrator to map the same steps from the person configuring the workspace.
- Add a Renew section with the steps that bring the customer back in month two.
