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TBM 310: Trees, Journeys, and Loops (and the Functional Model Trap)
- In cross-functional product development, model types frequently manifest as capability trees, customer journeys, and growth loops.
- Capability trees, as the name suggests, describe the functional capacity or potential of a system, team, or organization to carry out a particular action or process.
- Customer journey maps describe change and progression from a customer's perspective.
- A flywheel hypothesis for a product, sometimes called a growth loop, helps to establish a clear sense of the core loop that would retain customers, enable them to do more effective work and ultimately indicate sustainable, differentiated success for both the company and its customers.
- Capabilility trees are useful for establishing a shared language that can endure over time but are less effective for describing the present moment.
- The journey grounds us in the customer experience as they traverse the current iteration and solution for our capabilities, helping us plan improvements.
- Each model shows relationships between things. Capability trees show how higher-level capabilities depend on lower-level capabilities. Journeys show how one step leads to another. Flywheels show how variables feed into each other.
- The functional model trap occurs when you lose sight of the holistic forest through the trees, and run into trouble when thinking about these things in isolation.
- These models and their potential variations can complement each other to establish a more resilient shared language across product, design, and engineering.
- Teams are encouraged to use as many helpful models as needed but make sure the models use ubiquitous language and link to each other to avoid the functional trap.
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