Builds a customer lifecycle journey map with behavioral entry/exit criteria per stage, one goal and one signal per stage, message briefs, and dead-zone flags. Use when someone asks "map our customer lifecycle", "where are the gaps in our lifecycle emails", "what should we send at each stage", or is aligning a team on lifecycle messaging strategy. Do NOT use to write the actual email sequence - use email-drip-builder for onboarding drips, win-back-campaign for dormant users, or push-notification-copy for push messages; this skill produces the map those campaigns are built on.
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name: Lifecycle Journey Map
description: Builds a customer lifecycle journey map with behavioral entry/exit criteria per stage, one goal and one signal per stage, message briefs, and dead-zone flags. Use when someone asks "map our customer lifecycle", "where are the gaps in our lifecycle emails", "what should we send at each stage", or is aligning a team on lifecycle messaging strategy. Do NOT use to write the actual email sequence - use email-drip-builder for onboarding drips, win-back-campaign for dormant users, or push-notification-copy for push messages; this skill produces the map those campaigns are built on.
---
# Lifecycle Journey Map
A lifecycle map answers one question for every moment a user can be in: what should they feel, know, or do next? Get this right and every downstream campaign has a clear job; skip it and the team ships overlapping messages with no owner, no goal, and no way to know if they worked. The costly mistake this skill prevents is calendar-based messaging - sending on day 7 regardless of what the user actually did.
## Inputs to collect
1. **Product and its first value moment** - the action that proves a user got value (first export, first invoice sent, first report shared). If unknown, propose one and label it a guess to validate against activation data.
2. **Tracked events** - the map can only trigger on events the product already tracks. Get the event list before designing transitions.
3. **Drop-off data per stage transition** - signup→activation rate, activation→habit rate, renewal rate. If unavailable, mark the map "unvalidated" and make pulling this data step 6.
4. **Existing touchpoints** - every email, push, and in-app message currently sent, with its trigger.
5. **Channels available** - email, in-app, push, SMS.
## Operating procedure
Order matters: stages before goals, goals before triggers, triggers before messages - a message brief written before its stage has an exit criterion has no way to know when to stop sending.
1. **Define the stages.** Use five canonical stages unless the product demands otherwise: **Acquisition, Activation, Engagement, Retention, Win-Back**. Resist inventing custom names until the team has shipped at least one campaign per stage - shared vocabulary reduces meeting time.
2. **Write entry and exit criteria for every stage as behavioral events, not dates.** A user who completes their first export on day 14 is exiting Activation on day 14, regardless of signup date. Every criterion must be an event the product tracks today. If the needed event is not tracked, flag it as an instrumentation gap rather than substituting a timer.
3. **Assign exactly one primary goal and one measurable signal per stage.** Activation owns the first value moment. Engagement owns habit formation. Retention owns renewal or upgrade intent. Win-Back owns resurrection. Blurring goals produces messages that do nothing well.
4. **Write a message brief per stage** - maximum three sentences covering: the user's primary anxiety, the one thing the product should say, the channel, and the call to action. This brief is the input contract for any campaign built on the map (hand it to email-drip-builder or push-notification-copy).