The Product Thinking Playbook Explained: Ecosystem Mapping
Ecosystem Mapping is the strategic technique that unveils the intricate web of connections in your environment and competitive landscape. Want to understand complex interdependencies, uncover opportunities and reveal value exchange?
Having previously highlighted ecosystem mapping as an essential in product strategy, Ian L. Foster now breaks down how product teams can apply Ecosystem Mapping and best practices for showing entity relationships when creating ecosystem maps.
What is Ecosystem Mapping?
Ecosystem maps the key actors and roles that relate to or influence a product, service or business to create a representation and understanding of the surrounding ecosystem.
Why would product teams do it?
Ecosystem mapping is an essential strategic exercise because it helps understand the relationships and interdependencies between different entities within a system and how value is exchanged. Mapping ecosystems can help understand potential gaps in, or opportunities for, synergies between different entities in the system. Unlike journey maps, ecosystem maps are static in nature and do not show how things change over time, but rather how things are connected.
Ecosystem mapping can be applied from many perspectives or ‘vantage points’. For instance, an ecosystem map can represent how people interact with different products, different roles and players within an organization, or how different entities interact in the broader marketplace.
Ecosystem mapping is a flexible technique that can illustrate many possibilities and vantage points; the project team must understand why an ecosystem map is needed and how to best illustrate it. Ecosystem maps do not typically follow a template and need to be well thought out beforehand.
When should product teams apply it?
Business Research: Ecosystem maps can effectively visualize the broader business environment and competitive landscape you are working in for a specific project or business.
User Research: Ecosystem maps can be a great way to contextualize the environment of your research subjects, whether they are customers, employees or actors. Ecosystem maps can help us understand at a deeper level the insights gained from user research.
Research Analysis and Synthesis: Depending on the lens of your ecosystem map, they can be used as an output of your research synthesis phase to show the relationships between the content researched.
Who is required?
Product Strategist/Manager (Lead): Identify the overall approach and strategic intent for the ecosystem map, including what it will contain in terms of content, entities, relationships and layers
Design Researcher: Support the development of the ecosystem map, depending on the type of lens the ecosystem map is taking
Product Designer: Support data collection, synthesis and visual design of the map
How do I do it? (Best Practices):
Determine the vantage point, level or lens through which you want the ecosystem to be developed. The intended audience can inform this of the ecosystem map and will ultimately determine its use and relevance. Are you mapping out partners, competitors or capabilities?
Show different characteristics and relationships in the ecosystem rather than just what is within the system. Ecosystem mapping intends to show how entities relate to each other. Unlike other design tools, such as journey maps, ecosystem maps are static in time and therefore, they do not necessarily show complete processes between entities.
Since ecosystem maps are static from a temporal perspective, good design elements and visual treatment of the map can expand the amount of information you are communicating. For instance, using different colors, sizes and shapes of objects can help readers understand the subtle differences between different entities in the map. A legend should be included to help readers understand the different features, symbols, shapes and more.
Use a supplementary tool if you can’t incorporate everything you want into a single visual. For instance, it may be a good idea to include a table or list with descriptions of the different entities you choose to include on the map. This can help ensure you have all the information you need without making the visual map too complicated for users to understand.
Tools/Resources:
Our Product Thinking Playbook is filled with tactics and techniques that help product teams build better products. Click here to download your copy of the complete playbook and stay tuned as we share more techniques in the coming weeks.