3 Design your map for insight and joint decision-making

Up to now, we have focused on building the map, in connection with priority challenges and opportunities important to our audience: collecting elements, placing them in a geography that makes sense to map users, and aligning them with an evolving Core Story of our enterprise. This gives us a shared picture of what we do, what people (might) want from us, what we aim to achieve – and how these questions are interrelated.

Once you have pioneered a working Milky Way map with Enterprise Elements a few times with a few co-creators, it is time to shift to using it more broadly and bringing it into everyday work. It’s no longer just a static artefact to pitch and show in a presentation. It becomes a living workspace for exploring questions, testing ideas, and building shared understanding across many audiences.

Just as a map of land and water, different challenges call for different map views. A map to plan urban development in a city looks different from one showing the route to take when moving around by bike, or a map based on voting districts to display election results. They show (and hide) distinctly elements and highlight different dynamics, but they all use the same base geography to visually encode and position the items they depict.

The map as a daily work tool

The Milky Way map supports many audiences — executives, product teams, architects, marketers, HR, or external partners. It works because everyone starts from the same geography, but we can depict different things in different ways. This way, people see more, faster. They understand each other quicker, and they can do this again and again without having to re-explain the basics each time. The geography becomes a common language.

Over time, you’ll notice the map is no longer “done” in the sense of fixed and final, but it grows with you. You’ll develop a “base map” with just a few basic views to show the geography and enable recognition, getting more and more stable while still being updated for accuracy and completeness. You’ll highlight different areas depending on what matters now. You’ll switch between “as-is” and “to-be” views, explore blurry parts to fill them in (or decide keep them blurry for now), and learn when to decrease the resolution for the big picture, or add and highlight elements in focus for detail.

Your initial goal as a map maker will be to make this map part of every conversation about key changes and related design decisions. But you’ll also learn when to stop navigating and seamlessly move to other tools, because the map already helped everyone find their way and deal with the mess.

Practical tips

The map for a new strategic ambition

This section outlines three exemplary ways to use a Milky Way Map View to respond to a specific challenge, showcasing its use as a navigation aid for any enterprise challenge. More than guides or templates, they apply the mapping strategies from the previous chapter as use cases based on real-life projects and engagements. The example follows the example of Intersection Railways acquiring a startup to enable a strategic shift to Night Train operations, aiming to disrupt low cost airlines for major European cities:

• Shift View: Start from a new, bold, and perhaps somewhat unclear ambition dropping from senior leadership, to visualise what needs to change their ways to make it happen, and achieve market impact (Sketchy Style).

• Outside-in View: Step into the customer’s perspective to see how our products fit into their journeys, and evaluating customer impact of changes by tying together various delivery models (Diagram Style).

• Overlay View: Organisational changes and associated metrics for a substantial merger or reorganisation, to highlight overlaps and synergies, evaluate trade-offs and redistribute accountability (Flowchart Style).

• Path View: Highlight a path to show how we deliver an innovative project from the underlying purpose to serving customer tasks, and focus on capabilities for organisation and product design decisions (Illustrated Style).

Shift View

In the previous chapter, the ambition-driven strategy showed how to put a network of interdependent purposes at the centre of a Milky Way, and then let capabilities, offers, and experiences align around it. The focus was on “what we want to become” and mapping that into a shared picture.

This view fits when the enterprise faces a radical shift in ambition or purpose, usually to deal with a few major challenges. It relies on two advantages of a shared geography and visual language:

• Familiar territory and depiction: anyone who is familiar with the geography will immediately find their way, or be able to guide others around a version of the familiar Core Story. Depending on the state of adoption, this includes anyone who participated in the creation of the initial map from the previous chapter, or a wider audience.

• Focus and context: the map focuses on the evolved purpose of the enterprise at a high level, giving direction but also giving a sense of where we start from. It adds the customer experience, operational capabilities and organisational teams as context for this shift.

It shows a highly aggregated view, purposefully reverting to a Sketch depiction to emphasise the map’s nature as a draft to spark thoughts, conversations and collaboration. It contrasts an assessment of today’s state of affairs with a desirable vision of a potential future state tomorrow, together with proposed actions to get there.

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A high level Milky Way Shift View of the enterprise, drawn in Sketch style

This example view for Intersection Railways shows two different Milky Way geography depictions: the scattered complexity of today (left) and the focused ambition of tomorrow (right), based on the current perception of senior leaders in the company and their vision for a more purposeful future state. They share the same base geography, but highlight different states:

• Today: multiple, often conflicting purposes as a result of the company’s history as a national public service, venturing into various markets and sectors. The map reflects the lack of a single ambition.

• Tomorrow: one clear ambition: sustainable travel to compete with airlines, through green mobility. It also shows a boost the company’s ability to renew itself through innovation and transformation as the Core Story cycle repeats.

How to read

The Shift View is divided into three parts, read from left to right, focusing on the evolution of Core Story in line with what was mapped in Chapter 2:

• Today shows our current purpose as people see us now, revealed through eliciting the perceived “actual purpose” people pursue. It shows us as fragmented and siloed, legacy-driven, compliance-oriented.

• The Gap in the middle highlights three initiatives that change the way we work, including a customer experience project, the acquisition of a startup and an internal transformation. They are designed to help us move toward a clearer and more focused purpose.

• Tomorrow shows our evolved purpose as a sustainable alternative to air travel. These ambitions build on the ambition-driven mapping strategy work, and here we focus on how to fulfil them.

Icons or illustrations help show subtle shifts that are hard to capture in words. In this example at 6 o’clock in the gap between cycles, moving from bureaucracy to supporting people, or at 11 o’clock from making basic digital planning apps to a full view of people’s journey across Europe.

The map doesn’t show every detail. Instead, it visualises and annotates the main messages we want to convey:

• People: from generic customer segments and freight to a clear target group of eco-conscious business and vacation travellers across Europe.

• Experience: from broken, incomplete, and fragile to seamless, end-to-end, high quality, reliable, and resilient service, expressed in customer quotes, and those we’d rather like to hear.

• Architecture: from many disjointed capabilities (counted from a more detailed source) that cause operational shortcomings, to a platform for green product creation and high performing and resilient service delivery.

This example also highlights two specific elements placed on top of the map:

• Today: organisational silos, marked as barriers between two teams to be overcome.

• Tomorrow: product opportunities, depicted between customer-facing capabilities and journey steps.

Each Milky Way view needs a clear focus. In this example, the focus is on Purpose. But the same approach could apply to another dimension, such as Experience or Capabilities. The key is to keep the focus clear and not overload the view.

When to use

This view is useful in situations of major transformation or strategic repositioning. Typical triggers include:

• external shifts such as new regulations, sustainability demands, or competitive disruption,

• changes accelerated by acquisitions or new partnerships.

Use it with C-level leaders and their direct reports, strategy teams, corporate development, innovation, and transformation leads—either as co-creators or as key input providers.

The view works in two ways:

1. Early on, as a way to align on a shared understanding of today’s challenges and a vision for tomorrow.

2. Later in the initiative, as a way to bring more people on board and connect this vision to other Milky Way or complementary views that show how the change plays out across different facets.

How to make

• Use A4 or A3 paper, or a digital equivalent.

• Allocate space clearly to Today, Gap/Steps, and Tomorrow.

• Sketch two Core Story cycles, steps and customer journeys on top – this creates the geography. Leave space in the middle to populate the Gap between Today and Tomorrow. Add key people, by default customer segments or key people like partners, suppliers or investors. Describe the story steps

  • Today: capture the current shared perception

  • Tomorrow: inspire people to with a future story

• Start with Today. Make it visually distinct from Tomorrow so the contrast is clear. Add customer quotes or insights at the top, and illustrate what the issue is in the current setup that requires us to shift. This could include customer quotes or insights, or illustrating journeys, capabilities and processes, organisational dynamics or key assets.

• Don’t worry if the map feels vague, high-level, or needs explanation. That’s fine if it still helps people grasp the overall shift.

• Use a sketch style to begin with. If sketching feels uncomfortable, involve a graphic facilitator or use icon libraries, or switch to a different EDGY style.

• When the view is ready for wider communication, adapt it:

  • choose a more accessible graphic style.

  • follow your brand guidelines.

  • consider diverging from the Milky Way format if it makes the message clearer.

Customer View

This view builds on the Outside-in mapping strategy, starting from the customer and looking at the enterprise with their eyes. In many enterprises, teams already map customer journeys and build service blueprints, but often in isolation and at a product level.

Each map shows a part of the picture: in the case of Intersection Railways this might include teams working on digital apps, another on onboard service, another on sales channels, and yet another on loyalty programs, but they rarely connect. The acquisition of a pioneering startup to integrate a promising Night Train product adds to this disconnected collection of insight and planning.

The Customer View shows a combined depiction of the end-to-end customer tasks, and maps them to our efforts as an enterprise to appear in their experience with valuable products and useful interactions. It uses the EDGY Diagram Style to emphasise the map's nature as a research and planning tool:

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A Customer View on the Milky Way

The Milky Way offers a way to bring these fragments together on one shared geography. It provides the teams with a shared view of customer journeys as a sequence of tasks, but mapped along the Core Story, and aligned with our enterprise capabilities and purposes as context. This link to the internal workings of the enterprise, including before and after acquiring and servicing customers, provides an overview where existing work can be placed side by side, linked, and navigated. This makes it easier to trace connections, spot overlaps, and use insights across teams, while keeping everyone oriented in the same landscape.

It also enables tracing back each product opportunity to delivery challenges or priority purposes, moving beyond tactical fixes to broader design questions. This helps spot overlaps and synergies across products, not just gaps in single journeys.

How to read

Following the Outside-in mapping strategy, the Customer View displays the passenger experience prominently, filtered to a key segment:

• Long distance traveller tasks appear along the top of the map, sequenced along a journeys: from initial ideas to planning to actually travelling.

• Tasks that have been identified through customer research as Top Tasks, those that really matter to our (potential customers), are marked with a yellow outline: planning trips with friends or colleagues, arranging local transportation, and dealing with delays when there’s a train connection. They can make or break the customer experience and deserve particular attention in product discovery and design efforts.

In the lower part of the map, you’ll find a high level view on the enterprise purpose and operational capabilities, also reusing the output of applying the Outside-in depiction of the previous chapter. This is a high level view on the inner workings, with elements filtered to display those directly relevant to the customer.

• The Core Story cycle creates the map geography in the centre of the map. This story is always evolving: this version is inspired by the vision outlined in the Shift View, but also grounded in the current reality.

• Purposes form the inner layer, giving direction to how capabilities required for pursing them are organised.

• Capabilities are positioned in each sector of the map, with newly acquired ones from integrating a Night Train startup company marked with a green outline. Those are focusing on product development in partnership with other operators and complimentary service providers, delivering high quality customer service, and using data for innovation and development.

The edge between tasks and capabilities is where the customer experience and the operational cycle meet. Equally inspired by the Shift View, the Customer View shows what products (might) appear in the customer journey, enabled by capabilities. It also shows which team currently covers which part of the customer journey.

• Existing products are marked in purple, acquired ones with a green outline. This includes existing train scheduling and ticketing apps, websites or vending machines, an specific apps and services provided by the Night Train startup.

• Opportunities for new potential products are marked in white with a purple outline, such as trip recommendations, transfer to the final destination, or assistance with connections.

• Below, organisational teams covering parts of the customer journey are depicted in light blue. Sales, marketing, digital or customer service teams all run their own journey management and service design work, resulting in a fragmented picture of the end-to-end experience, while the startup covers almost the entire journey, focused on their existing product.

A Milky Way map applying a Customer View shows an overview of what customers experience when interacting with the enterprise, and connects this to products offered, accountability for delivery capabilities, as well as supporting work done, and the underlying purpose. Weak links, gaps and empty spaces, or overlapping responsibilities become visible and actionable for enterprise design decisions.

Tracing back from the start and the end of the customer journey shows what happens before and after customer interactions, and what happens in the background – the backstage delivery that the customer doesn’t see but that makes the experience possible. This links product opportunities not only to tactical fixes but to broader questions of operational delivery and business strategy.

When to use

This view is useful when customer insights, tasks and journeys are already being researched and mapped by different teams, but remain fragmented and disconnected. It brings them together into a single shared geography, so overlaps, gaps, and handovers can be seen clearly.

This helps product managers and service designers identify new opportunities at the edge between tasks and capabilities, and it helps architects and strategists trace these opportunities back to delivery challenges and strategic purposes.

Individual product roadmaps or service blueprints often feature a bottom part that shows a single team’s selective understanding of the operational/organisational reality, or an idealised version to support the desired customer experience. A Milky Way map, especially when also used for operational planning and architecture, grounds this vision in a shared understanding of the enterprise, and helps visualise what needs to change to actually deliver.

Use the Customer View in particular when:

• Multiple teams run customer research, journey mapping or service blueprinting work in parallel, and leadership needs one coherent picture connecting these dots.

• Prioritising product discovery opportunities and deciding where to invest first.

• You want to move beyond isolated product development or tactical customer experience improvements and link opportunities to broader enterprise design questions.

• A merger or acquisition introduces new customer-facing products and services, and you need to integrate them.

How to make

• Start with a clear customer segment, such as long-distance travellers. Collect tasks from research, journey maps, and service blueprints.

• Place customer tasks across the top of the Milky Way, sequenced as a Customer Journey along the customer-facing steps of your Core Story. If applicable, mark Top Tasks so they stand out.

• Add purposes and capabilities below, filtered to those directly enabling the customer journey. Mark newly acquired ones to show how the combined enterprise extends its reach.

• At the edge between tasks and capabilities, add products: existing, acquired, and potential. Use tags or a visual cue to distinguish them. Highlight gaps and overlaps.

• Add organisational teams below to show who covers which part of the journey. This makes fragmentation, duplication, or missing ownership visible.

• Keep the diagram layered and simple, but use annotations or icons to highlight product opportunities and connect them back to delivery challenges or strategic purposes.

• Use EDGY’s standard diagram style unless there’s a reason to use Sticky or Sketch styles, to visually link your map to other models like Service Blueprints, Customer Journey or Capability Maps. If there is a known notation better adopted than standard EDGY, consider adopting it.

Overlay View

Many maps in the enterprise show operations: process diagrams, organisational charts, IT landscapes, or service blueprints. Each has value, but taken alone they miss the bigger picture: how does everything work together to organise and automate work, make products and deliver to customers?

Focusing on the inside workings of the enterprise, this view is establishing the geography to navigate capabilities and their interplay. The Overlay View places various EDGY elements into the shared geography of the Milky Way, making it possible to trace connections and dependencies. By using overlays, it avoids overloading a single map with detail, while still showing how different perspectives come together.

At the heart of the Overlay View is a base map that depicts the enterprise as a whole and “as it works today”.

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Using EDGY’s Illustrated Style with icons or simple visuals makes this map more than a technical diagram: it becomes a clear, appealing, and fun tool that people actually want to work with. This style encourages engagement and helps teams quickly recognise the parts of the enterprise they know, making it easier to have productive conversations about change.

Instead of drawing another process model, the Overlay View creates a base operational map and adds layers of information: teams, assets, metrics, or projects. This allows users to filter, compare, and switch perspectives without losing orientation.

How to read

The Overlay View starts from a base map of the enterprise, depicted in Illustrated Style. In this example, operational capabilities appear across the map in blue, showing the capabilities that make processes and collaboration work: from scheduling and ticket sales to infrastructure management and energy distribution. For more detail and accuracy, the arrows also specify what each capability delivers and passes to the next ones further down the Core Story cycle, such as “Emergency Bus Scheduling” providing “Relief” to “Drive Train” in the case of an operational issue.

As context, Customer tasks are shown at the top in red, sequenced as journeys from “trip ideas” to “arrival and feedback.” At the centre, purposes are displayed in green, giving direction to why these capabilities exist, such as seamless mobility, reliability, and sustainability.

This base map provides a recognisable Inside-out geography of the enterprise as a whole. It is detailed enough to show flows and dependencies between tasks and capabilities, but presented with icons and clear visuals so that it remains engaging and easy to navigate. People from different backgrounds can quickly find their area of work and see how it connects to others.

In this example, some earlier decisions about placement from earlier maps were revised, for example moving the Enterprise Design capability to the bottom gap at 6 o’clock, indicating that it is a shared capability supporting the entire cycle rather than appearing at the end of the story like in the previous view – which needs to be updated if also in use. Note that the right side of the map has fewer items, with suggests most work so far went into understanding and mapping the left side.

Once established, adopted and known, and even before being seen as complete, it is easy to use the geography to convey specific messages as overlays.

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Budget overlay (percentages): Grey blocks with numbers show how much of the budget is allocated to specific clusters of capabilities.

This reveals where resources are concentrated today, for example, in infrastructure, resource management, or operational planning. When combined with the base map, it becomes clear how budget distribution aligns (or not) with customer tasks and enterprise purposes. This sparks questions like: are we investing in what matters most to customers, or in things aligned with our official priority purposes?

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Organisational teams overlay: Light blue boxes highlight which teams or departments are accountable for parts of the enterprise, such as Sales, Digital, Operations, or Customer Service. This overlay exposes overlaps where multiple teams cover the same area, and gaps where no one is clearly responsible, at least as far as the map makers know.

It shows how organisational boundaries cut across the operational flow, and where accountability may need to shift. It also reveals when teams appear in several locations on the map, or on the customer journey side being directly accountable for supporting customer tasks, while others work “far away” of the customer, behind the scenes.

This can be used to inform conversations from planning “who does what” all the way to organisation design and development.

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IT systems and process overlay: this example shows only half of the base map, still recognisable and readable for anyone familiar with the geography. It presents the viewer with two depictions of the same thing, side by side:

• On the right side, a classic Process Model for from Planning to Track maintenance, along with a depiction of IT Assets (Software Applications) used for running these process steps. A colour code reveals if they are performing well, or with minor or major issues, with some annotations.

• On the left side, the same information is displayed as an overlay on a part of the Milky Way. Only the IT assets relevant to this process are shown, in EDGY Diagram depiction with a metric to show the same status information, but positioned next to the corresponding capabilities.

This Milky Way view and overlay enhances rather than replaces the Process Model with additional context:

• Adjacent capabilities are still shown, just faded out, so that additional dependencies are revealed – for example “Talent Demand” also relevant “Operational Planning”, does this affect this process? Are there other processes or assets, before or after, that we have to look at?

• Map readers familiar with the previous example will remember which teams might be affected by any change, such as “Procurement” when involving external partners.

• The purposes associated with this map sector, “Build trusted partnerships” and “Safety first” give additional context to our priorities, which might affect design decisions.

When to use

his view is most useful when transformation requires a clear and shared picture of how the enterprise currently works. Instead of these example, other metrics, elements or ideas can be shown on top of the map. It is particularly relevant:

• when evaluating the impact of change initiatives across teams, budgets, and systems.

• when preparing to consolidate or modernise IT landscapes and needing to link systems to business processes.

• when making investment choices and needing to compare resource allocation against customer needs and strategic priorities.

• when leaders need a single operational overview that combines different internal perspectives without losing the link to customers and purposes.

• when planning a reorganisation, merger, or integration and needing to see overlaps and redundancies.

For Intersection Railways, these overlays make it possible to ask sharper questions: Are we overspending in areas customers never notice? Which capabilities fall between teams? Which IT systems could we simplify after integrating the startup? How would a decision in one area or facet affect the others?

How to make

• Choose a support that is big enough to show the necessary level of detail. Place customer tasks along the top, operational capabilities in the middle, and purposes at the centre.

• Use the EDGY Illustrated Style with icons to make the map clear, recognisable, and engaging – but consider other styles of this is difficult to achieve.

• Use straight lines when displaying the flow between elements to reduce visual clutter and make it easier to read.

• Show how processes connect and depend on each other to enable the customer journey. Keep the view high-level but structured enough for teams to see where their work fits.

• Layer additional perspectives on top of the base map. Examples include budget allocations, organisational teams, or IT applications. Use visual groupings, highlights, or labels to keep them distinct without losing orientation.

• Explore overlays one by one to answer specific questions, or combine them to reveal cross-cutting insights.

• Export the base map in various formats, as an image to be imported in digital collaboration tools, and as a printed version to be used in workshops, to bring it into more and more conversations.

• Update the map as transformation progresses and use it in workshops to compare perspectives and support operational and organisational design decisions.

Path View

When launching new products, it is often unclear how a vision or purpose translates into day-to-day operations. Teams may focus on isolated aspects — product features, supply chains, or customer touchpoints — without seeing how everything fits together. The Path View addresses this by showing a concrete flow across the Milky Way capabilities, in context from other facets: from purposes at the centre, through a root capability and its connected processes, all the way to products, brands, and organisations that embody the result in the customer experience.

Unlike the Overlay View, which compares perspectives, the Path View highlights one end-to-end thread. Other parts of the map remain visible in the background to provide context, but the main path is emphasised. This makes it possible to ask: what does it take for this product to succeed, and who and what must come together?

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A Path View Milky Way map to answer the question “How might we enable made-to-order breakfast on our Night Trains?”

The starting point is the same base map as used for the Overlay View. Instead of overlaying elements or metrics, it works by highlighting the path along capabilities it touches, as well as context elements involved:

• customer tasks to be served,

• purposes to be pursued.

This view then adds additional instances to be highlighted, such as

• products or brands positioned to support customer tasks, and

• organisational teams to pursue these purposes and build up the capabilities,

• key assets, channels or content to be developed, or

• people involved or affected.

How to read

The Path View begins with marking the purposes to be pursued along the path, placed around the Core Story at the centre of the map. These purposes act as orientation points: the exam the Night Train, this might include “Sustainable products” and “Build trusted partnerships”. Other purposes are still relevant, but not in focus for this initiative.

The path starts with a root capability that is directly concerned with one or more of these purposes. In our example, the relevant root is “Product Portfolio Management” accountable for launching a new product, “Made-to-order breakfast on our Night Trains”.

From this starting point, the path is traced outward through the connected capabilities that enable the offer.

• In the Night Train Breakfast Delivery case, the line runs through “Resource Management Material” as a secondary root, along to Operational Planning, Station Management, all the way via Product Launch”, “Marketing” to reach “Passenger Information”, “Prepare Train” and “Train Restaurant”.

• Each step along this route highlights the specific contributions that need to work together to make the product real, and indicate the processes implementing these capabilities.

• Not shown in this example are assets required for this specific path, such as materials, data or applications, but this could be added if it gets into focus.

Along the way, intersection elements become visible.

• Products are configured, such as the Night Train breakfast meal offer to be available on the “Night Train” “Planning App” product to be developed.

• Brands are expressed, positioning the “NightXpress Brand” as a sustainable and premium experience at the beginning of the customer journey.

• Organisations are implicated, with our “Digital Team”and “Customer Experience Team” jointly responsible for the digital experience.

What might have been seen as “just” a catering option now appears as an end-to-end flow that cuts across the enterprise.

The Path View also makes it clear how this product manifests in the passenger experience. It shows the link from operational capabilities in the background — sourcing local ingredients, arranging logistics, developing the ordering app — to what the customer actually sees and values: a custom breakfast meal, available on their journey, with the promise of quality and sustainability, highlighting the tasks served. It also allows questions to be asked in sequence:

• How do we source the food from local partners at each destination?

• Who manages the logistics? Can our existing capability handle food items?

• How is ordering integrated into the digital channels?

• Who packages and prepares the food in the stations? Who serves it onboard?

• How do we capture and learn from customer feedback?

By following this highlighted path through the Milky Way, dependencies and potential weak links become visible. The root capability may rely on IT systems, supplier networks, or service teams that are under strain or still organised differently after the acquisition.

These issues, which could block the realisation of the product vision, can be surfaced and addressed. At the same time, the path reveals opportunities to reuse elements, such as “Logistics” or “Billing and Booking”, for other parts of the business. It also allows us to ask and discuss what’s missing:

• Do we need to add a dedicated capability for local partnership and procurement to source the produce?

• How do we trace the emissions generated and environmental impact along the supply chain – is the “Customer and Market Analytics” capability sufficient for this?

A Path View thus presents not just a customer-facing idea, but the full operational thread that makes it possible. It is both a design tool for exploring new offers and a diagnostic tool for understanding what it takes to deliver them.

When to use

The Path View is most useful when an enterprise needs to make something new real — whether that means launching a product or innovation, testing a business model, or integrating newly built or acquired capabilities. Unlike other views that show broad overviews, the Path View narrows in on one concrete flow and highlights everything it takes to bring it to life.

This makes it particularly relevant when launching a new product or service and needing to understand the path from strategic purposes through capabilities to what the customer experiences. For Intersection Railways, the Night Train food and beverage offer shows how something that appears simple to the passenger (a custom breakfast) in fact draws on a chain of interconnected capabilities, from procurement and logistics to digital ordering and onboard service.

Other use cases include:

• Integrate an acquisition and see how new capabilities connect with existing ones.

• Explore a business model shift, such as sustainable catering, and understand its impact across the enterprise.

• Clarify organisational involvement, showing which teams and partners are directly responsible along the path.

• Spot gaps or weak links in the chain that might block delivery or dilute the customer experience.

In short, the Path View is best used when the question is not simply “what do we offer?” but “what does it take to make this offer real?”

How to make

• Use the Illustrated Style to select colours, icons, or labels to distinguish products, brands, and organisations along the path, but consider alternative Styles if this is too much effort.

• Mark purposes: Identify the purposes to be pursued around the Core Story.

• Select 1-3 root capabilities: Choose where your path starts, selecting capabilities directly linked to the selected purposes as the starting point.

• Trace the experience impact: mark tasks to be directly served by the products to be delivered.

• Trace the path: Follow connected capabilities on the Inside-out base map that enable the product or service, and validate or iterate what is passed from one capability to the next one.

• Highlight the flow: Fade out other elements on the base map to emphasise the chosen path and highlighted elements while keeping the rest of the map muted.

• Add highlighted elements: Show products, brands, and organisations that emerge along the path or as a context, and position them on the map. Consider adding people, assets, content or channels if relevant to the challenge.

• Note shifts and gaps: Compare with the Overlay View to reveal where capabilities, teams, or systems must change for the path to succeed.

• Start with a small, concrete example (like a single product feature) before attempting an entire business model.

• Keep paths simple and readable, and avoid mapping every dependency at once.

• Compare multiple paths side by side to see where they share or compete for the same capabilities.

• Sync this map with other related maps, such as a business model canvas, product roadmap or or service blueprint.