How I use a company map and why it’s important

When to use a company map

Finding out about what we work on is just as important as how we work.

When running a growth sprint, I use the company map to help identify a target area to focus on for the day. I use this with large and small groups to converge towards a target area.

As UX people, product managers, designers, or even as the outsider consultant — it’s really important to understand your customer and client. This helps you do that in 20min tops.

What is a company map?

It’s a super simple, zoomed out view of the company’s activities in the customer funnel of Acquiring, Activating, and Retaining customers.

I try to get answers for the following questions:

1. How do the customers hear about the company?
2. What does the company do once the customer makes contact?
3. What do we do to keep the customer, in the first day, the first week, the first month, and the first year?

Why is it important?

Positioning the company challenges or opportunities (how might we’s or HMW’s) against a view of the current customer activity will show a cluster of where you have the most problems. It helps visualise where a target area should be.

It will also show where you might need to collect additional data to get the right metrics.

An Example guide (15–25min)

An example of Twitters company map.

1. Use a sailboat exercise to identify some challenges or take it further and create from HMW’s from those challenges. (It’s always better to work with opportunities than challenges!)
2. On a big board draw up 3 columns (Acquisition, Activation, and Retention)
3. As the facilitator, ask your group to talk about what goes in the columns and ask for the company activities in each area.
4. As the group calls out the various activities, start to draw this up — remember it’s a super zoomed out super simple view of things.
5. Once you’ve got a good collection of current activities, step back and ask if there’s anything missing. Invite people to come up and have a read themselves.
6. When the group has a good alignment of their customers funnel, put up the various challenges or HMW’s in the relevant areas one by one
7. Run a dot vote to get a prioritised and filtered list of challenges or HMW’s to then turn into Growth Experiments.