Our challenge was to identify, document, and evangelize how our product’s capabilities intersect across the platform, enable our service delivery and create user and business value.

Value Created

• Broke down silos between product team and established understanding of relationship between products, services and users by creating shared maintainable documentation 

• Documented intersection of products' capabilities to avoid redundancies in development and design work across products

• Established clear ownership of capabilities

• Built knowledge database and standardized language conventions to understand product functionality

• Facilitated API documentation and development

The Story

The Problem

Because of my unique position working on multiple products during internal systems modernization, I saw duplicate functionality, unnecessary rework, and overall wasted effort costing the company millions of dollars. 

I flagged these areas of waste and duplication to the product teams, and gathered insights from individual members of each product team to understand the causes and how they thought they could prevent it.

Overall, the sentiment was:

• All teams lacked a documented understanding of our high level business processes; 

• Teams were not fully aware of how our users worked together

• Teams did not know if another product team was already working on similar functionality.

To solve these issues I worked hands-on with all 24 product teams to develop living maintainable artifacts and that show a comprehensive view of the platform ecosystem (services, personas, products etc) so that teams could maintain focus on their products while simultaneously allowing for high level visibility.

Omni-Mapping

I started the process by mapping the high level business process, and how it interacted with the products we were developing.

To gather this information efficiently, I worked with organizational leadership to set up a workshop with the product teams.

The goal of the workshop was for the members of the product teams work with people outside of their day to day, to chart out the “happy” and “sad” paths of our business processes, and what current or future products support each step.

By the end of our session the four workshop the workshop teams mapped out what they believed to be complete service, presented it back to the group, and revised based on discussion. 

While synthesizing the resulting information, I found the customer journey maps too focused, service diagrams too abstract, and experience diagrams insufficiently detailed.

Because there did not appear to be existing practices that met my needs, I developed my own approach I called “Omni-Journey Mapping.”

An omni-journey map shows how the products and people intersect through our business processes, in a simple yet detailed fashion that anyone can consume.

Upon completion of  the map I reviewed it with the leadership and product teams for feedback and questions. 

The teams quickly adopted the omni-journey map as a tool to facilitate their thinking about their product in our platform’s ecosystem. 

In order to maintain the usefulness of the omni-journey map, I worked with the leadership team to set up a bi-annual meeting dedicated to it’s critique and refinement.

Enterprise Personas

Through my exploration and development of the omni-journey map, I also discovered that our existing of personas were out of date and limited in use. 

There was an apparent organizational appetite for accessible and well-defined protagonists within the narratives relevant to our products and services.However, the mindset surrounding “personas” was constrained to a concept limited to design rather than a useful cross functional tool. 

In order to expand this mindset I designated the term “Enterprise Personas” to specifically refer to personas that create an organizational understanding of the people using our products and services.

I worked with the user research team to build out content that would define the personas and their areas of usage.

We used these standards to write out a value statement to share with leadership, and successfully got funding to work on persona development for our most impacted business roles.

We worked in parallel with the product teams and program management to also create a working list of the personas, and set up a field within our DevOps system that enabled product owners to tag personas to work items.

This allowed teams to visualize the impact of work on users and inform them of when large changes are coming.

Below are examples of some personas we generated. The content is blurred as they contain potentially proprietary information.

Capability Mapping

By documenting our high level business processes through the omni-journey map, I helped the organization achieve a deeper understanding of our services while also increasing user awareness through the enterprise personas.

As a next phase, there was a need to provide better visibility around the entire platforms feature set,and to also identify functional redundancies. 

Existing documentation was spread out across product teams either in Excel documents or hard-to-find user stories, and lacked any ties to an abstract concept.

To address these issues, I worked with the program and content management organization to develop shared language for our abstract concepts. 

Then I met with each product team to document the features as abstract capabilities in mind maps.

Below are examples of some of the mind maps generated from those meetings.

The content is blurred as they contain potentially proprietary information.

The mind maps highlighted multiple instances of shared, dependent or redundant functionalities that were being redesigned, or rebuilt.

To further validate my observation, I reformatted the mind maps into a relational spreadsheet, which visually demonstrated redundancies. 

The spreadsheet allowed product teams to identify opportunities for collaboration and reuse across the organization, leading to:

• Improved product planning and scoping

• Reduced rework 

• Better organizational cohesion

• Quicker new hire onboarding

In addition to helping the product teams, the spreadsheet served as a tool for enterprise architecture to plan the products’ APIs.

Below are examples of the relational spreadsheet generated from the mind maps.

The content is blurred as they contain potentially proprietary information.

The Site Map

With the processes, personas, and capabilities documented, I wanted to contextualize their intersections by tying each to a pages in the platform.

We had an existing but outdated site map that was missing links to other important documents and did not reflect new in progress and planned work.

I made three goals for my updates:

• Document information architecture standards for our products

• Reorder the products to match our service process

• Tag the capabilities and personas to the pages in the site map

I worked closely with our content team to develop standard information architecture and naming conventions in our products, so that users would have a consistent pattern when navigating through different products.

We based the standards on what previously existed, prior user research, and business goals, for our various products and product types. 

Below are examples of the site map generated.

The content is blurred as they contain potentially proprietary information.

With standards established, I met with each product team to update or add their product to the site map.

The deliverable from these meetings was a printable PDF that was distributed across the company from C-suite to entry level.

Finally, I added all the pages in the site map to the associative spreadsheet and tagged them to capabilities and products.

Below are examples of the distributable site map.

The content is blurred as they contain potentially proprietary information.

Future

Mapping the whole enterprise across the various deliverables, and tying them together in a single source of truth increased transparency and broke down silos to help create helped create cohesive vision and understanding across the entire organization.

I am currently own the maintenance and improvements of the content documented above as we continue to develop and elevate the holistic vision of our software offerings.

Thank You

None of this work would have been possible if it weren’t for the passion and dedication of the J.B. Hunt E&T product teams and leadership. 

I am honored to be able to work with such a talented and collaborative group of individuals who are laser focused on delivery the best products for our users.