The Challenge of Mapping Complex Ecosystems in Design and Research

In recent years, design and research have increasingly focused on understanding customer needs through tools like customer journey maps or the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) frameworks. However, these tools fail to capture the complexity of modern ecosystems, especially in B2B contexts.

As markets become increasingly fragmented and interactions more complex, the need for more sophisticated tools and practices to map and understand these dynamics emerges.

The Limitations of Traditional Tools

Traditional tools are often focused on linear, isolated experiences of individual customers. For example, the customer journey represents a customer’s path through a specific product or service. At the same time, the JTBD framework tends to oversimplify customer needs into eight steps of a “consumption” job. This approach can be practical in simple contexts when designing point solutions, but they fall short when representing complex ecosystems where:

• Multiple organizations interact within the same ecosystem—some are actual customers, and others complement or partner with the solutions we aim to sell.
• Roles and decisions are distributed across various business personas that take part in complex decision-making steps.
• Customers utilize integrated solutions, combining their products and services with those from third parties.

This limitation was recently discussed by our upcoming podcast guest Helge Tennø (interview will air on February 4th) in very similar terms with his “Competitive advantage comes from seeing what nobody else can” . In the piece (from where the picture below is taken) the highlighted how the linear representation of the customer journey is no longer sufficient.

https://boundaryless.io/blog/challenges-ecosystem-centric-mapping/

Tennø emphasizes that competitive advantage today lies in an organization’s ability to systemically represent the market reality and integrate it with its unique capabilities and assets:

“Winning is not about making better decisions than everybody else, it’s routed in our ability to see what nobody else sees.”

The Boundaryless Experience and Approach

At Boundaryless, we are cognizant of this limitation and have already pioneered and explored more advanced tools to address this problem. Among our contributions:

• Ecosystem Domain Mapping, to define ecosystems, arenas, and customer needs. (Read more)
• Adopting Outcome-Driven Innovation framework within Platform Design, to frame the atomicity of ODI JTBD within platform-ecosystem thinking. (Read more)
• Platform Opportunity Exploration Guide, to explore platform opportunities in a structured way. (Read more)

Our Ecosystem Scans and Arena Scans can represent systemic interaction at a broad level in an industry. As a reminder to the reader:

• Arena Scans can be fruitfully used to lay down an industry/ecosystem view from your focus perspective;

Ecosystem Scans offer a deeper view into “slices” of the ecosystem where it’s also possible to map the various roles competitors and prospect partners play besides the customers;

https://boundaryless.io/blog/challenges-ecosystem-centric-mapping/

Despite these advances and our previous efforts to integrate ODI into the framework, we still see two major issues at play:

• The joint use of Arena Scans, Ecosystem Scans, and ODI/JTBD frameworks is functional but can become relatively too complex and, therefore, calls for an iteration that goes in the direction of more visual simplicity;
• The representation we used so far didn’t connect with the organizational landscape—in other words, it didn’t clarify what teams and units look after all the components that make the portfolio of products that—combined—respond to the system of customer needs to be captured in the mapping.

The latter (the organizational and product implication) is not a minor issue: in a recent interview we had with Erika Hall (a legend in research), we concluded that you can have an organization with a fully functioning capability to generate evidence-backed data on customers… but if your decision-making structure is unclear, the organization will likely end up in taking the wrong product decisions.

To pick from her words directly:

“…a lot of the discussion I’m seeing happen online about research is, how can we improve the research practice? That is the wrong question.

The question is how do we improve decision-making so it’s more evidence-based? And that responsibility is on the people making decisions because if you’re doing research and the decision-maker doesn’t want it or doesn’t care or isn’t prepared to incorporate it, it doesn’t matter how much you do. doesn’t matter whether it’s centralized, whether it’s out there.”

 

To address this issue – the separation of the responsibility of understanding customers and of deciding what we do as an organization – at Boundaryless, we’ve long preached the adoption of a so-called “Platform Organization” model where product-centricity in the organization – with distributed ownership of pieces of the product portfolio and decentralized P&L – is married with customer centricity through dynamic organization agreements that involve the GTM, the product leadership and all the necessary supporting capabilities through so-called EMC Contract which are no-more than Win Win Alignment contracts that align everybody’s interest (business outcomes) with customer success criteria.

To empower organizations to design themselves and their portfolio of services in resonance with the market, we have created a new tool, the Portfolio Map, which we will disclose in the next couple of weeks.

The Portfolio Map is designed to help adopters relate customers, needs, and the entire organizational stack—from products and services to go-to-market strategies to product and organizational capabilities. We believe it will help organizations become product-centric. At the same time, avoid missing being customer-centric, providing a straightforward approach to visualize dependencies and clarify decision making.

https://boundaryless.io/blog/challenges-ecosystem-centric-mapping/

However, we are aware that the first version of this tool will not yet fully solve the problem of representing complex ecosystems, which is a thread that needs more work.

Unbundling, Rebundling, and the Future of Portfolios

As the market becomes increasingly complex, it is essential to rethink how product and service portfolios are designed, and organizations need to balance the act of unbundling into components and products with rebuilding in ways that ultimately cater to generating excellent customer experience. Unbundling indeed means creating products and services that address particular needs, even beyond direct user interaction (many components may actually lack a “user interface,” exposing programmable interfaces instead), and these products, while specialized, must be capable of being dynamically re-aggregated into broader integrated experiences. This dynamic bundling allows organizations to respond to customer needs in real-time, offering comprehensive and flexible solutions.

In our experience, a good approach could be to consolidate P&L around such experiences, represented as Micro-Enterprises (product/service families) or dynamic agreements defined as EMCs i.e. or less static aggregates, contracts that aling every party’s interests.

Maintaining components and point solutions separated (only dynamically bundled) from product lines and GTM lines and encouraging dynamic agreements is even more crucial in a context where purchasing decisions will likely be increasingly mediated by automatic and agentic systems. Kenneth Auchenberg has explored these themes recently, emphasizing the importance of integrating products and services into an AI and agentic systems context with interfaces that are designed to for Agends to plug in natively (Read more):

”When looking at the tooling interface itself and how future integrations between AI agents and services will work, I think a good question to ask is whether we will see a new generation of interfaces emerge that are more efficient and better suited for AI agents.”

https://boundaryless.io/blog/challenges-ecosystem-centric-mapping/

These interfaces will likely be with components even if Auchenberg also envisions agents using browser automation to emulate human interaction and, therefore, being able to connect with end-user-facing products as well.

The Stack: From Engagement to Business Outcome

The modern organization’s mission is to address ecosystem complexity and translate perceived customer value into business value. This process unfolds across four primary levels:

1. Engagement: Capturing the customer’s attention by understanding their needs and goals. This, as anticipated, requires advanced tools that we don’t yet fully have to map an ecosystem of customer jobs and create relevant connections.
2. Delivering the Outcome: Once engagement is achieved, the organization must deliver tangible results through products that address the identified needs.
3. Achieving Behavioral Change: Once the customer adopts the product or service and accepts the associated costs, preferring them to an existing alternative, and alters their behavior, using the product becomes an integral part of their workflow or daily life;
4. Strategic Business Outcome: Finally, product adoption translates into business value for the organization, which is measurable in revenue, customer retention, or an expanded customer base. Here’s when the organization’s capacity to enact a portfolio strategy made of identifying control points and progressive solutions entering the client space through bundling and value escalation pathways becomes crucial.

This stack represents a fundamental guide for building a more systemic and ecosystem-centered approach capable of addressing the complexities of the modern market.

A Call to Action

What we propose here is the continuation of a line of research and experimentation that places a systemic representation of customer ecosystems as its raison d’etre and the architecture of modular organizations at its core. This requires new tools and new ways of thinking about research, design, and portfolio management, which at Boundaryless we are pioneering.

The future belongs to those who can see beyond simplifications and embrace the complexity of modern ecosystems. We are ready to do our part. Are you?

Stay tuned for the release of the Portfolio Map by subscribing to our newsletter.