Journeys or Conversations: Which Should You Build?

OBIE is an outcome delivery platform, and outcomes are delivered in journeys. So the default answer is: build a journey first. Conversations are for ongoing support once a member has worked through some of your material and has outcomes to talk about.

Both live side by side in your hub, and most mature hubs use both. What matters is the order your members meet them in.

What a journey is for

A journey guides a member through your IP toward a specific outcome. You decide the sequence, the questions asked, and what gets generated at each step. Every step has a finish line, and the member leaves with something they didn't have before — a positioning statement, a plan, a script, a filled-in framework.

That structure is the whole point. Your member isn't left staring at a blank box wondering what to ask. Your method does the asking.

What a conversation is for

A conversation is an open-ended chat with an AI that knows your material. There's no sequence and no completion state — the member opens it whenever they want to think something through, and can come back to it forever.

Conversations are also progress-aware: the AI can see the journeys, milestones, and steps a member has already completed, and can pull up what they produced in a step to talk it through with them. That is what makes a conversation genuinely useful — it's a coaching session about work the member has already done.

Why we recommend holding conversations back at first

A brand-new member has no outcomes yet, so an open chat box gives them exactly the problem your hub exists to solve: infinite answers and no idea what to do next. It also puts your hub in the worst possible comparison — a generic chatbot they could get for free.

Let them produce something first. Once they've completed a milestone, a conversation stops being "ask me anything" and becomes "let's work on what you just built."

Three ways to sequence it, from the conversation template's settings:

• Prerequisites — pick the steps a member must finish first. Until they do, the template shows as locked, and the member sees which milestone and steps they still need to complete.
• Visibility Rules on the template — show one conversation to some members and not others, based on progress, tags, active offers, or dates.
• Visibility Rules on the Conversations page — from Conversations → Page Settings, gate the entire conversations section of the hub, not just one template.

The exception: a conversation-first hub

Some hubs are meant to be conversation-first — an always-on advisor, a support desk, an office-hours companion for an existing program. If open-ended access to your expertise is the product rather than the follow-up, then conversations are your main event and there's no reason to gate them. Publish them, make them the first thing members see, and skip the prerequisites.

Just make that a deliberate choice rather than the default. If your hub is meant to deliver an outcome, lead with the journey.

A quick way to decide

• Is there a result you want every member to reach, in a sequence you control? That's a journey.
• Is it support, follow-up, or thinking-out-loud around work they've already done? That's a conversation.
• Not sure? Build the journey. You can add conversations any time, and they get better once members have progress for the AI to draw on.