Journey Templates: Build Once, Reuse Everywhere Sensibly
Rebuilding similar journeys from scratch each time is waste. Good templates let you reuse the pattern without one bloated journey for everything.
Once you've built a few journeys, you notice how much they overlap, onboarding a warehouse worker and an office worker share most of the same tasks. Rebuilding each from scratch is waste. But one giant journey trying to serve everyone is worse. The answer is sensible templating, reuse the pattern, vary the specifics.
Template the common backbone
The tasks that apply to nearly everyone, contract, ID, policy acknowledgements, live in a reusable backbone. Build that once, well, and reuse it rather than recreating it per variant with subtle inconsistencies.
Vary the specifics per population
On top of the backbone, layer the tasks specific to a role, location, or worker type. A warehouse hire needs safety training an office hire doesn't. Template plus variation gives you consistency where it helps and difference where it matters.
Don't over-template into rigidity
Templating too hard produces journeys that can't flex to a genuine local need, and people work around them. Leave room to adjust for real differences, or the template becomes a straitjacket.
Real scenario: a client built every onboarding journey from scratch, so they'd drifted into a dozen inconsistent versions with different policy tasks, a compliance risk. We built one solid backbone template with role-specific variations layered on. Consistency returned where it mattered, and building a new variant took minutes not days. Template the common, vary the specific, don't over-engineer either.