Visualisation and Storytelling for

Digital Product and Portfolio Management

Situation:​ I’m working in the portfolio and strategy department of the digital business area of a  machine manufacturer than aspires to bring digital transformation to its more than 40  manufacturing plants all around the world. The main goal of my company is to assist our  factories to adopt new digital technologies, and also create new digital products. The factories  are active in 4 main industries of Tobacco, Pharma, Tissue and Supply Chain.     Challenge​: Since all these factories to some extent are doing the same thing in different  industries, as part of their digitalisation efforts that have come up with digital tools (software and  applications) that are more or less the same at the core features but differ in minute detail  functionalities specific to their respective industry. Also these digital tools are built to serve the  existing customers but in the long run they need to compete with startups and other digital  native companies with decades of experience in the field. As an organization, we needed to find  a way to compare different digital applications made inside the company and also find out their  relative competitiveness in the market.     Selection:  To find the tool to tackle the challenge, I interviewed Product Managers, Designers, and the  higher management to find out what their pain points are and what do they need to better  understand their products positioning compared to other products and as well find the product’s  competitiveness in the market.I found out that this problem has been existing in the organization  for the past two years and the complexity of the task requires an iterative, collaborative  approach that may take a long time to construct, and people have conflicting ideas about how  the tool should look like. As a result without raising too much expectation, or claiming that I have  a complete result, I decided to make storytelling and visualisation techniques to bring more  clarity into how people perceive the framework should look like.     Application:   Since most of the digital solutions we built try to help the people working in our customer  factories do their job more efficiently, first I created a strawman proposed framework and story  on how data from our machines is used to create the digital applications and assist the  customers. Sharing the visual framework and presenting it as a story on how data is being used  to create value for our customers.

Then looking at the competitor applications tried to come up with features (EPIC clusters) that if  put together can create different software applications like a Lego.

Putting these EPIC clusters into the storyline, and juggling them around, I made a prototype of a  tool to map the relative completeness of own and competitor applications in the EPIC cluster  dimension, while at the same time iterating on the EPIC clusters.

Finally I could come up with one visual model that many of the stakeholders liked, and believed  is able to map the features of both internal applications and external solutions.

Insight:​ This radar diagram splits the value propositions of our digital offerings into 6, and then  split those value propositions into 19 distinct EPIc clusters and is able to measure the relative  strength of the internal and external applications and as well show the overlap between various  applications.   Using this tool, now our product managers can compare the features of their applications with  those of others, and the applications in the market, and check how complete their applications  are. Also Portfolio managers can look at the applications and see if there are reusable  components that exist between their own applications. This is becoming also the basis to  assess the relative synergies acquiring startups can bring for us.     Approach:   Next time I would do more formal journey mapping, and create more prototypes. I sometime feel  the proposed framework is not fully responding to the needs of stakeholders. I should have  interviewed more people and spent more time understanding the problems before jumping to  create a solution. The process was more like, creating a solution and then trying to find  customers for it, while turning and tweaking it to fit with the needs of  different stakeholders.

