The days of the Colored Markers and huge whiteboards are long gone.
I realized after lockdown that long meetings carrying intensive discussion were a luxury.

It's a new era of short calls and packed schedules.
Every meeting is expected to start with an agenda and end with Next Steps.

Every communication, every meeting is expected to be short, sweet, and meaningful.

The punch of a thousand words are meant to be delivered in a sentence.

A picture speaks a thousand words better than a single sentence does.

Visual Models are Mental models for the eye. They help you engage with, interpret and process content more easily helping increase the depth and speed of comprehension.

The whole story begins with what do you want to explain today and continues to who is the audience.

Do you want to represent a big idea concisely to your customers or your leadership?

Or do you want to elaborate on a big idea and how it works for your team, peers, and others?

Good things come in small boxes.
Good ideas also come in small packages.

If you are looking at a car from in front of you, you can observe the color, and the make and model, the shape, and probably the people in it. You can also see that the glass is down, and the music blaring. You could also probably recognize the music.

If you are watching the same car from a flight taking off, you notice that it's a car, probably its color, its shape, and its speed.

Details add noise to the big picture.

Showing someone the macro view helps cut down the clutter.

The Concept Map

Target Audience: Product Teams and Leadership
Intent: Sharing Vision and presenting the concept for acceptance

The concept map helps you illustrate and present, well, a concept.

If you have an idea, and your intent is to explain it and its constructs, this is a beautiful way to do it.

Always begin with the Big Reveal. Pick and chose three minimum, four maximum most important constructs of your idea that you would like your audience to know.

For example, we are pitching to our company (an automobile manufacturer) the concept of a flying car.

You could represent N dimensions in a concept map, but a human’s capability of comprehension is only so much.

Value Proposition Canvas

Target Audience: Product Teams and Leadership
Intent: Sharing Vision

Talking to a crowd of just ten people, I can bet that no two people will exactly be on the same page on any given day. One person will know more about X, while the other about Y.

But before you deliver your great idea, you need people to be primed and prepared to receive and review it with their mental frameworks.

A Value proposition Map is a double-layered visual model that helps you achieve 2 things:
- Establish a common understanding of the target users
- Pitch the value proposition of your idea with the established understanding.

The Past, Present, Future Map

Target Audience: Product Teams and Leadership
Intent: Sharing Vision

An idea in a time is static. But the bigger picture often is meant to encapsulate the evolution of an idea.

If you pitch the idea of the flying car today, you might want to chalk the future to space shuttles.

Future Vision is crucial to acceptance of the Current Idea

The purpose of this mapping is to show the audience the evolution of something over certain parameters. Hence it is important that you chose the parameters that are of interest and consequence to your audience.

In the above example, I have assumed that the three major parameters that interest my audience while pitching an App like Uber are — Turnaround times, Safety, and Cost of Ownership.

The Micro view, as the name represents focuses on communicating the depth.

For me, the micro view came in handy :
- To answer the “How” once the audience has been intrigued by the “What” and “Why”
- To help my Engineering Team get the big picture and the high granularity
view
- To talk in-depth about a concept
- Helps brainstorm ideas on the “How” front

Digging deeper into a concept

MindMaps and Spider Maps

Target Audience: Product Team, Engineering Team
Intent: Alignment

If you notice closely, most of the thoughts in our brain are interconnected. That is they tend to follow a hierarchy.

Dumping the interconnected thoughts of our brains, picking up the ones of consequence, arranging them neatly to create a story is all MindMaps are about

Mindmaps can be used to represent near about everything. But in the current context, MindMaps/SpiderMaps can be used to break down a big concept into its related components.

In terms of Products, it usually means Product Idea -> Features -> Behaviors. It helped me break down my one-year roadmap into consumable chunks for us to discuss, brainstorm over, and roadmap.

The beauty of Mindmap is that its infinite space could help represent two features as beautifully as a hundred.

Representing a complex system of multiple stakeholders

Swimlanes

Target Audience: Engineering Teams, Product Teams, UX Team
Intent: Alignment and Brainstorming

One of the most challenging Products I designed was a solution for delivering hundreds of interdependent MiniApps to a Marketplace, ensuring they work together in different permutations combinations.

Every idea goes through the cycle of Conceive, Construct, Convince and Create.

For me, the creation was difficult simply because the idea represented a complex interaction between multiple different user personas. In terms of numbers, it meant around 8 different personas performing more than 50 different actions which further led to a series of reactions.

Swimlanes help you identify and classify the responsibilities and actions of each user persona in a sequential manner.

Swimlanes are probably the best visual model when it comes to a complex workflow involving multiple personas.

Customer Journey Map

Target Audience: Product Teams, UX Team
Intent: Brainstorming and sharing research findings

Once you have talked through the “Why”, “What” and progressed to a depth of “How” it is important that we take a high granularity view of what we are building against.

To build any great product, the understanding customer is critical. And it is not said enough but your teams should be customer-familiar as well, mays well as you but still.

Customer Journey Map is the best way to represent the granular picture of a customer you are building for.

If you were to talk about customers of a cab-booking App like Uber, this is how you can represent the customer journey. The below image is in no way complete but is used to illustrate the idea of the Customer Journey Map for you.

Emotion Mapping

Target Audience: Product Teams, UX Team
Intent: Brainstorming and sharing research findings

Because we just talked to customers, it is also important to know how they feel at each step of the journey they take with you.

Emotion Mapping helps you do that. While the concept is elaborated and explained here, the brief idea is to use Emotion Mapping to represent the emotions you are building against. This allows teams to make the right decisions while creating.

An Emotion map can be very easily and naturally combined with the Customer Journey Maps.

User Story Mapping

Target Audience: Engineering Team and UX Team
Intent: Brainstorming and alignment

How do you take a big idea, break it down into pieces and plan the execution? I have used several methods to achieve the intent, including presentations and excel sheets but I find a visual representation the more comprehensive and comprehensible.

A User Story Map allows you to:
- Represent a journey to implementable stories
- Capture the sequentiality or parallelization of stories
- Break down into multiple releases

Representing System Behavior

Flowcharts

Target Audience: Engineering Team
Intent: Alignment, Grooming, and Planning

Flowcharts are the most flexible and universal way of representing logic. It's a popular way to represent system behavior. The beauty of Flowchart is that it allows you to represent a simple and a complex concept as easily. You could make a flowchart of a Product behavior, or chart out the behavior of your smallest capability.

Flowcharts can provide you a thousand-foot view and an On-Ground view.

State Diagrams

Target Audience: Engineering Team
Intent: Alignment, Grooming, and Planning

State Diagrams are commonly used in Engineering courses to represent complex systems that go through a variety of states under certain conditions.

A Product is nothing but complex systems and State Diagrams allow us to view it from a lens of ever-altering states of the system.

State Diagrams are especially helpful in casting our attention on identifying corner/edge scenarios. They can be used to represent complex products as easily as simple small capabilities.

My Favorite Tools

I primarily rely on 2 tools to help me create Visual Maps:

• LucidChart — The visual workspace for remote teams
• Miro — Best Online Whiteboard Tool

Final Thoughts

In my experience as a Product Manager, gaining alignment is as important as designing elegant solutions. An out-of-the-world solution is nothing if your stakeholders do not get your vision and ideas.

It has been an amusing experience for me watching what a misalignment could do to my Product.

Communicating ideas both big and small from a birds-eye view and an on-ground view are extremely critical. And Visual Maps are the best ways to achieve the goal.