This article builds upon the concept of “value slice transformation” which has been introduced earlier in “How value slices can fix your digital transformation”.

Digital businesses that quickly adapt to market and tech trends can gain a significant advantage. The caveat? Business adaptation means organization change — team structures need to be realigned with the new strategic focus. If structure isn’t aligned to strategic business and product bets, convoluted daily work processes and communication workarounds need to make up for the deficiency. Consequently, work starts to feel complicated and slow, sometimes inhibiting the actual reason for change — improving time-to-market and product-market-fit. 

On top of all that, without the right approach, organizational change doesn’t just fail to deliver, it can burn people out, too. While thinking in terms of value slice transformation helps, getting consensus on how you should approach it and what you should prioritize is difficult. That's why you need a map: a map helps to clarify your options and to get everyone on the same page. In this blog post, I'll explain what this map should include and how to create it.

Create the Map

Every digital business bet is driven by a value impact proposition. This proposition is the sensemaking glue between the relevant business goals and the organization’s investments and initiatives. Consequently, a common understanding of where in the business landscape the value shall be created is mandatory. Otherwise the proposition implodes when the organization attempts to execute on it — whether that’s in project plans or standing teams’ roadmaps. 

So, what’s the answer to this organization tool gap? The product map is a tool that helps strategic decision-making stakeholders develop a clear, shared vocabulary and understanding of the portfolio of value created for customers. This is a prerequisite for identifying and aligning strategically important areas for organization structure change initiatives and their potential for faster delivery and value creation.

So, what do you need to do to create a product map? I see it as involving six steps plus preparation and ongoing follow-up tasks:

1. Preparation — form an interdisciplinary working group.

2. Align on a holistic definition and term for customer value being created 

3. Align on mapping principles and processes

4. Create a high-level list of value propositions

5. Refine and conclude the map

6. Launch and then continue to maintain the map)

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

1. Align on a holistic understanding for customer value creation

Prepare the mapping process with establishing a core team of less than 10 influential and knowledgeable business and technology experts who understand the urgency for the organization transformation. Then, this working group must establish a common understanding of what customer value creation entails — much like cartographers must know what landmarks are to be considered for their map. They needn’t start from scratch, but should take industry good practices in. 

Participants from diverse backgrounds, including business, operations and IT, can bring unique perspectives here. While business stakeholders may focus on specific offering configurations, others emphasize skills, maintenance or technical components. All perspectives are crucial for a comprehensive understanding of value creation. However, regardless of service details or operational processes, what truly matters is how well the product map allows for focus on whether customer needs are met. To achieve this focus, the group will identify and work with 'value aggregates'—combinations of devices, services, processes and systems. The final map becomes the common vocabulary for the value aggregates and is key to selecting and driving the right value slice transformation strategy.

Internal vs. external value creation:

While external value creation directly addresses customer needs, internal value offerings solve problems for internal users, indirectly impacting customers. Mapping both is recommended. Capturing internal value creation helps identify areas for improving capacity and interfaces.

2. Align on mapping principles and process

With a holistic understanding of customer value, the group can begin the mapping process. Essentially, this process is about mapping the company’s business from a customer value angle. Here are three key principles to follow:

• Start with what you know: Collect and observe existing data, rather than being overwhelmed by “what could be possible”.

• Build detail gradually: Add detail step-by-step to avoid confusion.

• Prioritize usefulness over comprehensiveness: The map should be practical, not an exhaustive academic exercise.

Following these principles, the process consists of two mapping phases making up three activities (see graphic below). We will go into detail for each part of the process in the next sections. In short these are:

1. Inductive mapping: 

•  Collect data and discuss observations: Begin with the most familiar business offerings, systems and capabilities and discuss observed patterns.
• Map high-level value propositions: List first premises on what the company’s high-level value propositions are. 

2. Deductive mapping:

Refine and conclude the map applying mapping rules: For each premise, the group can decide using clear rules whether further deduction is necessary and into which parts.

3. Collect data, discuss observations and derive high-level value propositions

Inductive mapping describes the process of combining concrete data to conclude on a more generic understanding of value being created — high-level value propositions. The first step of inductive mapping is to collect relevant data (see visual for examples). The more up-to-date and accessible the data are, the more accurate the mapping results will be (it can make sense to spin off short projects to enrich that data). To make the data available for discussion, it’s necessary to group it together either on physical walls or a virtual collaboration tool. The data collection itself can happen asynchronously.

As soon as data from all relevant angles is available, the group addresses the three main questions to observe and discuss patterns for: 1) What are the high-level customer problems the company addresses? 2) How does the profit and loss (P&L) account structure relate to them? 3) Which other data points are relevant for value proposition mapping? I recommend selecting one angle to start the process with. That could be, say, either a business, financial, process or a system perspective. Alternatively, you could start asynchronously inside the ‘silos’ and come together in the group to lay the results over each to log in similarities and discuss differences.

The overall result might look like the following: Business offerings grouped together with systems, processes and capabilities and additional information like departments or tribes involved. For now, a simple column view is sufficient. Add it to the data collection space (physical or virtual).

EXAMPLE

Business experts might bring a list of various credit card products. However, all credit cards solve the same core problem - allow for purchases but without immediately impacting the current account. Going further to the list of offerings you will observe offerings with similar value proposition, e.g, buy-now-pay-later or current credit products. While identifying additional involved offerings/products, it's becoming transparent which parts of the business contribute to this value proposition of helping individuals with liquidity through credits and loans:

For everyone [in market X, country Y..]

Who needs liquidity to finance purchases or special investments

We provide them with credit and loan services

By deciding quickly and delivering the best end-to-end process experience

Achieving  highest possible flexibility for customers to pursue their plans

4. Create the final product

The work group is now aligned behind key premises for high-level value propositions that allow them to dig deeper without getting bogged down in an endless loop of finding the right fundamental value vocabulary. In other words, this common understanding is the predisposition for the next step as it builds on these established axioms to construct the final map in loops to deduce and decompose.

The final product map needs to be detailed enough to support organization adaptations, i.e. re-organization focus decisions that are aligned with customer value creation in strategic areas.

EXAMPLE

A new business growth for revenue growth is created which argues to introduce new tap-to-phone payment capabilities in existing SoftPOS products. But, how to exercise this initiative most quickly and effectively? First, spot the right product portfolio (e.g. here "merchant payment services"), to identify the business and product owner and to analyze the data to determine whether and to what extent it makes sense to set up autonomous product group (value slice) around the SoftPOS offerings' delivery to drive that strategic bet.

5.1 LOOP 1: Map detailed product portfolio clusters

To bring both closer together value delivery focus and target organization structure, let's juxtapose the high-level value propositions with more useful data to add detail to the map. The guiding question is "Where do we want to put product portfolio steering focus (oftentimes connected to P&L responsibility) so that the value proposition comes true?". Helpful data could be a list of current teams and their scopes, descriptions of customer personas/segments ("Who are our customers and what are their pains/gains?"), journeys and delivery channels ("Where and how do customers interact with us?"). While we are looking for similarities in how customer problems can be solved, we try to strike a balance between autonomy and synergy. Allocate systems/services and capabilities to the resulting product portfolio clusters. If a clear match isn't evident, consider whether the system and/or capability represents an internal product cluster highlighting a value creation dependency. 

You might run the loop multiple times, first with a full autonomy, then a full synergy focus and then derive a balanced view.

EXAMPLE

Let's revisit the first banking example and the loan/credit value proposition. Here are some potential delivery aspects impacting value proposition decomposition:

• Loan size/trust level: This considers the risk involved and required verification processes.
• Customized vs. standard products: This distinguishes between personalized loan options and pre-defined, rarely changing offerings.
• Time to approval: This focuses on the speed of loan application processing.
• Business process synergies.

As a group, consider what truly satisfies customers within this high-level value proposition. What features differentiate the offerings? Think about your key customer segments and what makes their ideal customer journey.

5.2 LOOP 2: Further deduction of autonomous product groups

In some areas of the product map, plotting moves and analyzing respective data demands even greater detail on value provided to customers. Most times this is due to one of the following reasons that warrant a mention on the Map: Special strategic focus area, high complexity (proxied by number of people involved), or intricate processes, systems, or services. In our example, this could be a fast-to-market premium mortgage experience with a new digitized customer journey, retail experiments with BNPL at point-of-sale or risk management engine algorithms.

Support use & maintain the Map

The purpose of the product map is to enable strategic and tactical conversations about where to go next with organisation adaption efforts, how current efforts are going, and where to revise previous moves. An effective map therefore provides:

1. An overview to allow users to identify a starting point for such conversations, 

2. Filtering, drill-down/up capabilities to explore possible moves, 

3. Display of relevant metrics for each item on the map to support decision making with relevant information,

4. Instant, self-service, easy access to pull up the map whenever and wherever it's useful.

While the first output of the mapping process may be an MVP-like static asset, it's advisable to soon separate data storage and presentation and use a modern BI tool stack (e.g. MS PowerBI or Google Looker Studio) for better user experience and less time-consuming maintenance.

Finally, boost product map use by:

• Engaging with users of the product map view to learn more about how they use it and how to improve the views to increase adoption.

• Running show-and-tell sessions to explain the BI toolset and how to work efficiently with filters, slicers, sorting, etc. 

• Proactively brainstorm other possible use cases and offer product map views as proof of concept for use in these processes. 

• Publish the dataset via a BI tool to allow more technical colleagues to build their own views on top of it.

This leaves us with the question, who shall be responsible for maintaining the product map after its inception? Remember that it needed a cross-functional team to reach consensus incl. business and technology sponsorship to come up with an initial version. Here, maintenance implies: asset ownership, map adjustments, viewpoints and data tending, and change facilitation. Think about and define:

• Who could own an asset of such a far-reaching meaning and cross-functional nature?

• Where is capacity created to facilitate and who takes part in

  • Map structure revisions

  • Map roadmap definition and execution (viewpoints, data richness, toolset)

  • Map user support

Now, with the product map and proper maintenance processes in place, you're ready to tackle the next steps of organisation transformation: comparing and selecting areas, preparing and ramping up, and executing and delivering on value slices.