How to use guide for Smart Journey

Introduction

Smart Journey is an app developed to help you turn processes into clear, reusable templates that guide your team step by step. Instead of relying on scattered notes or ad-hoc task lists, you can build structured Journeys that ensure consistency, reduce errors, and make it easier for everyone to know what to do next.

Before you start building your first journey, it’s helpful to take a moment to plan. A well-prepared journey is easier to set up, easier for your team to follow, and more likely to deliver the results you want.

Important thoughts you need to make before creating your journey

Have a few thoughts in mind to reduce complexity

Don’t try to map out your entire organization’s workflow in one go. Focus on one process (e.g., onboarding, quarterly planning, client renewal). This keeps your journey simple and easy to test.

Start out small

Begin with a short journey you know well. This lets you experiment with Smart Journey’s features (stages, tasks, automations) without overwhelming yourself or your team. Once it works smoothly, you can expand or duplicate it for other use cases.

Map out key tasks

Think through the most important actions your team must take. For example:

• Kickoff meeting with client
• Send welcome materials
• Review goals internally
• Prepare renewal proposal

Tasks should be clear, actionable, and easy to assign to one person.

Set milestones

Milestones are checkpoints that help you track progress and ensure nothing critical is missed. Ask yourself: What must be true before moving to the next phase?
Examples:

• Contract signed
• First delivery completed
• QBR (Quarterly Business Review) held

Every phase should have at least one milestone.

Different phases of the journey

Break your process into logical phases (stages). Each phase represents a time period or lifecycle step (e.g., Onboarding → Adoption → Review → Renewal).

Best practice:

• 3–5 stages to start with
• Each stage should contain 4–5 tasks
• Keep stage names short and intuitive (e.g., “Kickoff,” “Adoption,” “Q2 Planning”)

Finally

With this preparation done, building your journey inside Smart Journey becomes much easier. You’ll simply translate your mapped-out process into stages and tasks, assign owners, and let the app keep everything organized and visible for the team. Smart Jouney makes it available for you to build your own journey from scratch, or chose between pre-built templates you easily can modify.

Getting Started

Smart Journeys lets you build reusable process templates (aka “journeys”) to guide your team through structured steps over time (e.g. opportunitis, quarterly reviews, client onboarding, renewals).

This guide walks you through installing the app, building a template from scratch, populating it with stages and tasks, automations, and provides recommended best practices so your journeys are clean, consistent, and effective.

How to install Smart Journey

1. Navigate to monday marketplace.
2. Search for “Smart Journey”.
3. Install app.
4. Click “use app”.
5. Choose the desired workspace and board/boards.

How to add Smart Journey to your item view

1. After installing the app on your chosen board, open the item view.

2. Click the “+” button to add a new view.

3. Select “Explore more views.”

4. In the search bar, type “Smart Journey.”

5. Click “Add to item.”

Smart Journey will now appear in the item view for all items on the selected board.

Templates

Create a new template

1. Go into the settings

2. In the side-menu, click “Template builder”

3. Click the “Select template” dropdown

4. Click “–New template–“

5. Enter template name

6. Build your own Template!

Edit existing template

1. In settings, there is a click “Template builder”
2. Click the “Select template” dropdown

3. Choose the template that you want to edit.

4. Now, edit the template.

5. The template saves automatically, so just exit, when you are done editing.

Editing features in the template

Rename Template

Use the green “✏️ Rename” button to rename the template.

Duplicate Template

Use the purple 📑 Duplicate button to copy and adapt an existing template.

Delete Template

Use the red 🗑️ Delete button to delete the template.

Understand the Layout

Stages

Represent phases of your process (e.g., Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, or Month 1, Month 2…).

Click the “Add Stage” button (right side of the screen).

Name the stage (e.g., Q1, Onboarding, Renewal Prep). Repeat until you’ve mapped all the stages in your process.

Our Recommendation: Keep stage names short and precise. If time-based, use quarters or months. If activity-based, use lifecycle stages like Kickoff – Adoption – Review – Renewal.

Tasks

The specific actions your team must complete at each stage.

Adding tasks to stages

1. Navigate over to the stage that you have just made and click Add Task.

• Give the task a title/name

• Choose a task type (e.g., General Task, Meeting, Call, Milestone)

• Assign a person to the task
• Add a date

2. Each task appears as a card inside the stage.

3. Repeat for all tasks required in that stage.

Our recommendation: Include at least one milestone per stage (e.g., a review meeting or checkpoint) to measure progress.

Task management

How to Start a Task

Starting a task helps you track which tasks are currently in progress.

Steps:

1. Locate the task you want to start in your project board
2. Click the dropdown button (three dots ⋮) in the bottom-right corner of the task card
3. Select “▶️ Start Task” from the dropdown menu
4. The task status will change from “Not Started” to “In Progress”

How to Mark a Task as N/A (Not Applicable)

Sometimes tasks become unnecessary or irrelevant. Instead of deleting them, you can mark them as N/A to keep a record.

Steps:

1. Locate the task you want to mark as not applicable
2. Click the dropdown button in the bottom-right corner of the task card
3. Select “❌ Mark as N/A” from the dropdown menu
4. The task will be updated with:
   • Status changed to “N/A”
   • ❌ icon displayed
   • Checkbox disabled (cannot be completed)
   • Task title appears with strike-through

Ad-hoc Assignments

Not all work fits neatly into templates. Sometimes you just need to assign one-off tasks outside of a full journey. That’s where Ad-hoc Assignments come in.

How to Create an Ad-hoc Assignment

1. Click on “Create new Journey”

2. Create a single or multiple Ad-hoc stages.

3. Add tasks the stage:

• Title the tasks clearly.
• Assign them to the right person.
• Add due dates if relevant.

Automations

When an item is created, add journey template to item

As soon as a new item is created (e.g., a new client, deal, or project), a journey template is automatically added to the item.

When status changes to something add journey template to item

When the status of an item changes to a specific value (e.g., “Contract Signed,” “Approved,” “Active”), the system adds a journey template to the item.

When status changes to something, replace journey with journey template

If the status changes to a specific value, the system removes the current journey (if any) and replaces it with a new one.

Example: Yearly Account Planning

Here’s a suggested structure

Best Practices

• Keep stage names short and intuitive.
• Use action verbs in tasks (Book, Review, Send).
• Always include a milestone per stage.
• Start with 3–5 stages, then expand