Resources: The Good Partner Map
The Good Partner Map is one of my methods for understanding and improving the value teams create, deliver, and capture for their cross-functional partners. I designed the tool for Second Wave Dive as part of a curriculum I call the Strategic Business Thinking, a 12-week course to help designers gain more trust and develop better relationships with business partners.
The Good Partner Map by Second Wave Dive
This particular tool helps teams develop a sense of how their cross-functional partners perceive them. People are using it to document a model of their functional value, to help understand how excited their partners are to work with them, how easy the team is to engage with, and how to make improvements. It pairs particularly well as a follow-up to XPLANE’s great Empath Map exercise.
Here’s how it works:
GOAL: The goal of the exercise is to gain a deeper level of understanding in how your partners perceive you and the value you provide. The exercise can be done individually, as a team, or with your cross-functional partners. In this format*, I recommend completing the map as a discipline team; the design team, the PM team, etc. You should be able to make a rough map in about 30 minutes. Even if you’re conducting the exercise by yourself, the exercise helps you identify the value you provide to your partners so you can improve.
* I do have another version of the map I use for two partners at once. I’m testing that version now and will release once it’s been vetted a bit.
Completing the map has a sequence and is organized by numbered steps. The map is organized into three sections; Your Discipline Value Model, Mapping Partner Reactions, Innovating Your Model.
Your Discipline Value Model
The left side of this map is about understanding the perceived value of your discipline. Before you can analyze what’s working or not, you must first have clarity on your own model of value. This portion the map connects the skills, capabilities, processes, communications, etc. you provide to specific partners.
Step 1: Start by capturing WHO are you providing value to? Ask yourself, “who are the partners I’m working with and what do they need to get done?” Based on what you know about them, what are they on the hook for? What do they find painful about getting something done? What will they gain if they are successful in their job? IMPORTANT: Create a separate map for each partner or function.
Step 2: When you think about the skills and capabilities you provide to the company and your partners, WHAT are you providing of value? List out all the the skills or capabilities that your team provides (e.g., research, graphic design, front-end development, etc.).
Step 3: This step is all about your processes, routines, and ceremonies. HOW are you communicating your value? What are the activities, methods, or processes the team uses to engage with their partners? e.g., rapid prototypes, workshops, design sprints, design systems, emails, Slack messages, etc.. It’s important to not only list the activities, but also the ways you communicate with you partners.
Step 4: The last step in on the left side of the map is often overlooked in my experience. When you think about all the items in steps 1-3, WHY do those elements generate value for you, your team, your partner, and the company? This part of the exercise is intentionally meant to check yourself. The more you can see your value through the eyes of others, the better understanding you’ll have.
Mapping Partner Reactions
This is my favorite part of the map. Why? Because it changes the focus from understanding to reflection. In this step, you’ll map how excited your partners are about the elements of your value and how easy or hard it is for them to adopt those elements into their work. It’s here you should ask yourself, “What about my offer excites my partner” and “What do they think is easy or hard to do?”.
Step 5: After doing so, we take the components from steps 2, 3, and 4, and place them on a 2x2 grid. The position that you place your elements on the grid shows you the actions you need to take with them. The grid is divided into 4 areas:
High excitement, easy to do: this is where you’re creating the greatest value right now to your partners. These are the elements where you have alignment and partners are working with you.
High excitement, hard to do: this is when you receive a lot of excitement about the element, but you partners still aren’t engaging. You may hear something like, “I love this, but I don’t really know what to do with it.”
Low excitement, easy to do: Elements in this category can often show up as pain points for the design team. Your partners may not be responding or think that what you’re offering isn’t really necessary.
Low excitement, hard to do: This category is where we place the elements that never see the light of day, not even a response. Hopefully you don’t have too many things here, but if you do, these elements just aren’t providing value right now and should not be prioritized right now.
Innovating Your Model
Now that you’ve placed the elements of your model in the categories, the right side of the map is about how you can innovate your model. Always be improving!
Step 6: Document the elements of your model that are both easy to do and create excitement. These are in the top-right quadrant from step 5. When innovating your model, you want to make sure you’re not unintentionally removing these. If you do want to remove them, that’s a separate activity for which I suggest performing some scenario analysis.
Step 7: The next step is focused on the bottom-right quadrant of the grid. Here, you’ll look at the elements that are easy to do, but generate little excitement. Questions you can ask yourself are, “what elements can I prompt differently?” or “Can I create a new call-to-action for my partner?” Examples may be new email updates, updated agendas in meeting requests, or . The goal here is to identify new ways you can engage with your partner and raise their excitement just enough so they respond. We want to move them into the top-right quadrant.
Step 8: Here, grab the elements that show up in the top-left quadrant. To innovate these, it’s important to know that your partners are already excited and you just need to find new ways to make it easier for them to engage with. Questions you might ask yourself are, “How can I adjust time the time needed for this workshop to fit their schedule?”, “How might I reuse existing ceremonies or meetings instead of creating a new meeting?”, or “How might I include some actions in my playback?”
Step 9: Finally, the last step is select two elements you want to change. Taking the answers from answers from Steps 7 & 8 and choose two, then make a backlog with the rest. Change is hard y’all and takes some time. You also want to ensure you’re able to track any actions to change.
Pro-tip: Keep this model as a live map in your favorite virtual white-boarding tool. As you test your changes, revisit and update your map. I’ve done this on a quarterly basis and thus far, that cadence has worked well.
Over time, you’ll be able to innovate your own value model and in turn, become a much better partner to your colleagues and co-workers.
I’ve released the map under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license. You are free to use without restriction in modeling your own or other people's partnerships, but restricted for for commercial purposes.
TLDR: Share, copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format; Adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the material; If you want to use the map in your software or sell it as a service, reach out for permission. I appreciate attribution whenever you use it.