How to Build and Use a Product Map Inside Your Organization

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When organizational change isn't aligned with product strategy

This article builds on the concept of "value slice transformation" introduced previously in "How Value Slices Can Fix Your Digital Transformation."

Digital businesses that adapt quickly to market and technology trends can gain a considerable advantage. The catch? Business adaptation implies organizational change, team structures need to be realigned with the new strategic direction. If the structure isn't aligned with the strategic business and product priorities, labyrinthine daily processes and communication workarounds have to compensate for the deficiency. As a result, work starts to feel complicated and slow, sometimes undermining the very reason for the change, improving time-to-market and product-market fit.

What's more, without the right approach, organizational change doesn't just fail to deliver results, it can also burn out teams. While thinking in terms of value slice transformation is useful, reaching consensus on the approach and priorities is hard. That's why you need a map: it helps clarify your options and get everyone on the same page. In this article, I explain what it should include and how to build it.

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The product map: a shared language for value creation

Every digital business challenge is driven by an impactful value proposition. That proposition is the shared understanding linking relevant business objectives to the organization's investments and initiatives. As a result, a common understanding of where value will be created across the business landscape is mandatory. Otherwise the proposition collapses once the organization tries to execute it, whether in project plans or permanent team roadmaps.

### Value aggregates, the map's basic unit

So what's the answer to this organizational tooling gap? The product map is a tool that helps strategic decision-makers develop a clear, shared vocabulary and understanding of the portfolio of value created for customers. It's a prerequisite for identifying and aligning areas of strategic importance for organizational structure change initiatives and their potential for faster delivery and value creation. Concretely, the map is organized around "value aggregates", combinations of devices, services, processes, and systems that together address the same customer need.

@cite:guider-l-inconnu-une-boussole-pour-naviguer-les-initiatives

### Six steps, from preparation to maintenance

So what does it take to build a product map? I see it as involving six steps plus preparation and ongoing follow-up tasks:

Preparation, put together a cross-functional working group. ; Align on a holistic definition and term for the customer value created. ; Align on mapping principles and process. ; Create a high-level list of value propositions. ; Refine and finalize the map. ; Launch and keep maintaining the map.

Let's look at each of these in detail in the sections that follow.

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Step 1: align the organization on a shared definition of customer value

### Putting together a cross-functional working group

Prepare the mapping process by putting together a core team of fewer than 10 influential, capable business and technology experts who understand the urgency of organizational transformation. This working group must then establish a shared understanding of what creates customer value, just as cartographers need to know which landmarks should be considered for their map. They shouldn't start from scratch, but should build on industry best practices.

Participants from diverse backgrounds, including business, operations, and IT, bring unique perspectives. While business stakeholders may focus on specific offering configurations, others emphasize skills, maintenance, or technical components. All perspectives are crucial for a complete understanding of value creation. Regardless of service details or operational processes, though, what really matters is the product map's ability to keep the focus on satisfying customer needs. The final map becomes the shared vocabulary of value aggregates and is key to selecting and driving the right value slice transformation strategy.

### Internal vs. external value

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 where capability and interfaces can be improved, for example data platforms or internal customer-support tools, whose quality directly shapes the experience delivered downstream.

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Step 2: set the mapping principles and process

With a holistic understanding of customer value in hand, the group can start the mapping process. Essentially, this process consists of mapping the business's activity through the lens of customer value.

### Three guiding principles

Start with what you know: collect and observe existing data rather than getting overwhelmed by "what could be possible." ; Build out detail progressively: add detail step by step to avoid confusion. ; Favor usefulness over completeness: the map should be practical, not an exhaustive academic exercise.

### Two phases, three activities

Following these principles, the process comprises two mapping phases made up of three activities. We'll explore each part of the process in detail in the following sections. In summary, it involves:

1. Inductive mapping: collect data and discuss observations, starting with the most familiar offerings, systems, and capabilities; then map high-level value propositions by listing the first premises.

2. Deductive mapping: refine and finalize the map by applying clear rules, for each premise, the group decides whether further deduction is needed and in which parts.

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Step 3: inductive mapping, starting from data to derive value propositions

### Collecting and cross-referencing the data

Inductive mapping describes the process of combining concrete data to arrive at a more generic understanding of the value created, the high-level value propositions. The first step is collecting the relevant data. The more current and accessible the data, the more precise the mapping results will be; it may be worth launching short projects to enrich this data, or even leaning on AI copilots to pre-qualify and cluster large volumes of existing documentation ahead of the group session. To make the data available for discussion, it needs to be grouped together, either on physical walls or in a virtual collaboration tool. Data collection itself can happen asynchronously.

As soon as data from all relevant angles is available, the group addresses three main questions to observe and discuss patterns: what are the high-level customer problems the business solves? How does the profit-and-loss structure relate to these? What other data points are relevant to mapping the value propositions? I recommend selecting one angle to start the process, a business, financial, process, or systems perspective. You could also start asynchronously within "silos" and then bring the group together to overlay the results, note similarities, and discuss differences.

The overall output could look like this: business offerings grouped with systems, processes, and capabilities, along with additional information such as the departments or tribes involved. For now, a simple column view is enough.

### Example: mapping a credit value proposition

Business experts might bring a list of various credit card products. However, all credit cards solve the same fundamental problem, enabling purchases without immediately impacting the checking account. Going further down the list of offerings, you'll observe offerings with similar value propositions, for example buy-now-pay-later or revolving credit products. As you identify additional offerings and products involved, it becomes clear which parts of the business contribute to this value proposition of helping customers fund their purchases through credit and loans: for everyone in a given market who needs liquidity to fund purchases or special investments, the business provides credit and lending services, deciding quickly and offering the best end-to-end experience, with the greatest possible flexibility to pursue their plans.

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Step 4: deductive mapping: building the final map through loops

The working group is now aligned behind the key premises for the high-level value propositions, allowing them to dig deeper without getting stuck in an endless loop of searching for the right core-value vocabulary. This shared understanding serves as an axiom for building the final map, through successive loops of deduction and decomposition. The final product map needs to be detailed enough to support organizational adaptations, that is, reorganization decisions aligned with customer value creation in strategic areas.

EXAMPLE: a new revenue-growth opportunity emerges that argues for introducing new contactless payment capabilities into existing SoftPOS products. How do you execute this initiative as quickly and efficiently as possible? First, identify the right product portfolio (for example, "merchant payment services"), to identify the business and product owner and determine whether it makes sense to create an autonomous product group, a value slice, around delivering the SoftPOS offerings.

### Loop 1: product portfolio clusters

To bring the focus on value delivery and the target organizational structure closer together, 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 place product portfolio leadership, often tied to P&L responsibility, so the value proposition can be realized?" Useful data could include a list of current teams and their scope, descriptions of personas or customer segments, and journeys and delivery channels. As you look for similarities in how customer problems can be solved, you look for a balance between autonomy and synergy, then allocate systems, services, and capabilities to the resulting product portfolio clusters. You could run the loop several times, first with full autonomy, then with a full focus on synergy, before deriving a balanced view.

EXAMPLE: revisiting the loan/credit value proposition, several delivery aspects can shape its breakdown: loan size and the trust level required, personalized versus standardized products, time to approval, or business process synergies. As a group, consider what really satisfies customers in this value proposition, what features differentiate the offerings, and what makes their journey ideal.

### Loop 2: further deduction of autonomous product groups

In some areas of the map, tracing the moves and analyzing the data requires even more detail on the value delivered to customers, most often because it's a particular area of strategic focus, high complexity, or complex processes, systems, and services. In our example, this could be a premium, fast-to-market mortgage experience with a new digitized customer journey, retail experiences with buy-now-pay-later at the point of sale, or the risk-management engine's algorithms.

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Step 5: publish the map and drive adoption

The purpose of the product map is to enable strategic and tactical conversations about the direction to take with organizational adaptation efforts, how current efforts are going, and where to revise previous moves. An effective map therefore provides: an overview that helps users identify a starting point for these conversations, filtering and drill-down/roll-up capabilities to explore possible moves, display of relevant metrics for each element to support decision-making, and instant, self-service access wherever and whenever it's useful.

While the first output of the mapping process might be a static, MVP-like asset, it's advisable to soon separate data storage from presentation and use a modern BI toolstack, for example Microsoft Power BI, Google Looker Studio, or an equivalent with a natural-language analytics copilot, for a better user experience and less time-consuming maintenance.

Finally, increase use of the product map by engaging users of the map view to understand how they use it and how to improve the views to boost adoption; running demo sessions to explain the full BI toolset and how to work effectively with filters, segments, and sorting; proactively anticipating other possible use cases and offering the map views as a proof of concept; and publishing the dataset through the BI tool so more technical colleagues can build their own views on top of it.

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Step 6: govern and maintain the map over time

That leaves us with the question: who should be responsible for maintaining the product map after it's created? Remember that a cross-functional team was needed to reach consensus, including business and technology sponsorship, to propose an initial version. Here, maintenance involves ownership of the asset, map adjustments, managing viewpoints and data, and facilitating change.

Think through and define who could own an asset with such a broad, cross-functional scope, and where the capacity is created to facilitate and take part in revisions to the map structure, in defining and executing the mapping roadmap, viewpoints, data richness, toolset, and in supporting map users.

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

Disclaimer: The statements and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Adservio.

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