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Game Changer

Align your communications with your vision, strategy, and technical truth.

Book a 30-minute call. Download the Value Map Data Sheet

Connect Engineering to Sales and Marketing.

What is a Value Map?

Your Value Map is a living library and canonical inventory of accurate, up-to-date product information stored as interconnected entities such as features, benefits, challenges, and personas.

It is a single source of truth encapsulating the full potential of your product.

Why does Value Mapping Matter?

You need everyone in your company—sales, marketing, and technical—to communicate about your offerings consistently, accurately, and compellingly. Tracking all that information and keeping it up-to-date is hard.

The Value Map product communications framework helps you produce up-to-date, relevant content, aligning your communications with your vision, strategy, and technical truth.

From Information to Insights

Turn your product information into insights and content assets faster with the OSP Value Map. Strategic communication begins with a granular understanding of what your product does and the value it delivers. 

How We Help

We work with you to document your value proposition at every level of detail, from individual features to whole platforms.

We bring years of experience communicating about complex technologies to transform your detailed knowledge into clear, consistent messaging for your audiences.

Value Map how to and use cases

Click the Value Map diagram image above to enlarge.

Click the topic titles to see a selection of use cases and our Value Map glossary.

 

Upwards: WHY? From technical detail to business value

  • From features to solutions to positioning, tagline, and USPs
    • Use for marketing, content, and campaign planning
  • From technical detail to business value
    • Use for roadmap planning
    • Assess feature ROI
  • Answers: "Why are we investing in this feature?"
  • Answers: "What solutions and business value does this feature deliver?"

Downwards: HOW? From broad claims to technical truth

  • From broad claims to technical truth
    • Features, Feature Areas, Feature Categories are technical answers to business questions.
    • Use for technical due diligence
  • Answers: "How does your product solve/address my business challenge?"
  • Answers: "How do we deliver that business value?"

Value Map Glossary

  • Feature: Unit of business or technical functionality
  • Feature Area: Logical-functional group of Features
  • Feature Category: Logical-functional group of Feature Areas
  • Value Case: Benefit + Challenge + Solution
    • A given feature or functionality's Value Case expresses the technical answer to a business question.

Interactive Data Sheet: the OSP Value Map

What’s in it for me? Click to open the colored sections and subsections below to learn more about what makes up the Open Strategy Partners Value Map and what you can get out of it. By the way, this is a Value Map of the Value Map :-)

OSP Value Map Structured Data icon

Structured Data

Every aspect of your product becomes structured data distilled into reusable logical-functional groups, product positioning, and all your communications.

OSP Value Map Search and Filter icon

Product Insights

Search, sort, and study your product for content ideation, production, and strategic insights through the lenses of its features, the challenges it addresses, the benefits it delivers, and the needs of your target personas.

OSP Value Map Sales Enablement icon

Sales & Marketing Enablement

We convert your product expertise into product marketing and sales enablement with our expert framework and services for collecting, organizing, and maintaining your product information.

Better Communication Strategy

Accelerate consistent, fact-based communications that drive growth.

Challenge: Better strategy

Challenge

To create a better communication strategy, you need to capture the value of your products in your customers’ eyes, what sets you apart from your competition, and plan the messaging to sway new customers.

Solution: Collective knowledge

Solution

Pour your collective knowledge, experience, and expertise into the OSP Value Map structures and methodology to ramp up your professional communications operations rapidly.

Benefit: Enable communication

Benefits

Enable all stakeholders to communicate about your product consistently, accurately, and compellingly.

What do we mean when we say, "Accelerate consistent, fact-based communications that drive growth"?

The OSP Value Map gives you:

A CMO-on-Demand for Product Communications

Challenges: You need to capture, de-silo, and unify your product knowledge, vision, and market intuition for everyone to share and act upon.

Solution: The Value Map framework and methodology give you ready-made structures to articulate your communication and strategy, with or without a dedicated marketing team.

Benefits: Remove the guesswork from building your communication strategy and accelerate telling the world about the value you deliver.

Relevant Value Map Features

  • For the cost of a junior headcount, get OSP’s experienced team supporting you.
  • OSP works with your teams to pull their perspective, expertise, experience, and technical brilliance out of their heads and apply it to strategy and messaging.
  • Opinionated but flexible strategic structures and approach.
  • Fact-based, unified product positioning and product messaging.
  • Analytical approach to content and sales planning.
  • Communication strategy at everyone’s fingertips: your team and all other stakeholders.

Unified Positioning, Aligned with your Technical Truth

Connect technical features to fact-based product positioning.

Challenges: To help you come to a consensus on your product positioning and get buy-in from all stakeholders, you need a single source of truth about the features and benefits of your product.

Solution: OSP works with you to collect granular, comprehensive, structured data about your product’s features. Then, we “distill” these, concentrating them into logical-functional groups, then into product positioning.

Benefits: Connect with your critical, tech-savvy audiences (via fact-based positioning, free of hyperbole or guesswork).

Relevant Value Map Features

  • Reconcile and unify the diverse (and valuable) understandings of your product across the tech and marketing/business functions in your company.
  • Positioning based on collaboration: engineering, marketing, and others collaborate on vision, facts, and positioning.
  • A structured process to debate, unify, and create your Value Map and positioning strategy, backed up by clear workflows and templates.
  • Positioning based on substance — your features, customer experiences, market priorities and differentiators.
  • Build a collaborative understanding of your product with stakeholders from across the organization.

Marketing Campaigns, Editorial Planning & Coverage.

Better planning makes better campaigns and lead-driving content

Challenges: Planning strategically aligned campaigns and editorial coverage related to large, complex products is challenging.

Solution: The narratives, topics, prioritization, and personas captured in your Value Map are the tools you need to get the job done consistently.

Benefits: The OSP Value Map is the link between your strategy and effective, efficient content production and ensures targeted messaging.

Relevant Value Map Features

  • Quickly determine strategic narratives and authority topics
  • Rank and track strategic narratives, themes, and topics by strategic importance
  • Surface marketing campaign ideas
  • Generate content topics to support marketing campaigns
  • Identify and track editorial coverage on relevant themes, including where you need to fill gaps and where you need to double down
  • Create accurate, comprehensive content briefs for efficient content creation, and align content with your strategic aims.

Comprehensive Competitive Analysis.

Outpace your competitors by understanding your product’s true value.

Challenges: Sales teams (and potential customers!) struggle when comparing similar products from different vendors due to their wildly varying feature-naming conventions and levels of detail presented.

Solution: Create a Value-Map-based competitive matrix. Compare your product to your competitors using unified naming, categories, and detail. Identify gaps and opportunities in the feature sets and roadmaps across the competitive landscape.

Benefits: Understand and prioritize the areas where your product shines for marketing, sales, and communications. De-prioritize others (or add them to your roadmap!)

Relevant Value Map Features

  • Competitive Analysis: examine yourself and your competitors at multiple levels of granularity: features, logical-functional groupings, and business solutions.
  • Competitor Product Communication Analysis: collects and reviews competitor messaging around core benefits, positioning, and main claims.
  • Group and name specific functionalities and how they deliver value to level the informational playing field to make apples-to-apples comparisons.

Richer product communications faster

Tame the Complexity of Communicating about your Complex Product.

Challenge: Tech is complex

Challenge

Your technology is complex. So is communicating about it. Sales and marketing need to accelerate content creation while maintaining technical truth and on-brand messaging.

Solution: Accelerate

Solution

Accelerate your asset creation and approvals: Combine your technical truth with reliable writing and editing processes.

Benefit: Increased volume

Benefits

Increase the volume and quality of content published while also increasing the autonomy and mastery of your authoring teams.

What do we mean when we say, "Richer Product Content Faster"?

The OSP Value Map gives you:

Accurate, Compelling, Consistent Messaging.

Craft high-quality, consistent content with buy-in from all stakeholders.

Challenges: It is difficult to describe, position, write, and talk about your product consistently across many communications and sales touchpoints and as it evolves.

Solution: The Value Map is a central repository that all stakeholders can consult and contribute to for up-to-date messaging, accurate features, and the value they deliver.

Benefits: Accurate, compelling product communications — sales, marketing, investor pitch — 100% backed up by your technical truth, the feature set under the hood.

Relevant Value Map Features

  • Agreed-upon terms, language, and concepts ready to use for product pages on your website, brochures, sales resources, and more.
  • Un-siloed technical truth available to everyone: accurate descriptions of features and the value they deliver.
  • Living library of information, updated with every release.

Baked-in Best Practices, Templates, and Workflows.

Professional communications tooling to supercharge your impact.

Challenges: You can’t automatically assume that your high-value technical teams are also experienced strategists, writers, and communicators.

Solution: Years of industry experience go into OSP’s communications toolkit. It includes refined and documented best practices, templates, and workflows tailored to the strategic and communications challenges you face daily delivering complex technical products and services.

Benefits: Flourish as an effective communicator, whether you are in sales and marketing or just have to wear that hat on top of your other responsibilities.

Relevant Value Map Features

  • Product Communication Framework, documentation, and learning materials
  • Product communication standards, guides, and templates
  • Modular writing and editing process, fully documented, and extensible

Produce Better Content Faster.

Process + templates + your Value Map add up to consistent, smooth content creation and approval.

Challenges: Content authors hate staring at a blank page, not knowing where to go. The fear of forgetting a feature or missing a priority can be paralyzing ... or maybe you just don’t know what to write about today.

Solution: You have put in all the hard work getting to an approved strategy. Based on the Value Map, you and your teams can focus on production with confidence, your canonical source of alignment between your communications, vision, strategy, and technical truth.

Benefits: Content creation is smoothed and accelerated by building on a solid, approved informational base (your Value Map), standardized content templates, and an editorial workflow.

Relevant Value Map Features

  • Save technical-staff time. Anyone creating a content asset can consult the Value Map for features and details before contacting a technical resource.
  • From content strategy to production faster: The Value Map puts your up-to-date, approved strategy and your product’s technical truth at your fingertips — no need to reinvent it, no need for guesswork. Everything you need to plan and write content.
  • From strategy to plan faster: Sort and prioritize — personas, features, etc. — based on your strategic needs and goals, and get down to planning specifics!
  • From plan to brief and outline faster: For a given content asset, fill out your content templates with the relevant information from your Value Map: personas, challenges, solutions, etc. Add your conversion goals, and they’re ready for approval!
  • From outline to draft faster: With a completed brief and outline, the content creation process almost becomes an exercise in filling in the blanks. You can focus on effective writing, conversions, and making it all flow.
  • From draft to publish faster: The content brief and outline act as an editorial checklist for a given content deliverable. And the information in your Value Map backs up what’s in the brief!

Deep, wide, technical foundation

Build your product & sales comms on a solid, factual foundation.

Challenge: Difficult to know everything

Challenge

It’s difficult for everyone to know everything about your product. Different roles naturally have different perspectives and priorities. Contradictory product claims can be detrimental to winning customer trust.

Solution: Robust foundation

Solution

Build your product and sales communications on a robust, comprehensive foundation: a granular, structured analysis of your product.

Benefit: Substance and fact

Benefits

Substance and facts shape your positioning and communications, not opinions. Knowledge is de-siloed and shared.

What do we mean when we say, "Deep, Wide, Technical Foundation"?

The OSP Value Map gives you:

Granular, Structured Product Information.

Map your entire product, zoom in on the value relevant to any customer or content asset.

Challenges: Creating a comprehensive account of everything your product does is a big task. Connecting all the features to the challenges they solve, the business value they deliver to different target groups is much, much bigger.

Solution: The OSP Value Map is a repository and inventory of accurate, up-to-date product information stored as interconnected entities such as features, benefits, challenges, and personas.

Benefits: Document your product or service at every level of detail, from individual features to entire platforms, and even against your competition.

Relevant Value Map Features

  • The Value Mapping process begins with a deep, structured analysis of your product, ideally involving all stakeholders. OSP helps you express each feature’s "why" — the business challenges it helps solve — with detailed questionnaires, interviews, market research, and our domain expertise.
  • OSP helps you capture everything important about your product. This can be a lot of data: features, benefits, challenges, target personas and organization types, relevant content, and the links and relationships between them.
  • Your Value Map turns the product data into a categorized, "living library" of product information.
  • In the Value Map, the entire scope of your product data becomes usable, accessible, and a huge asset for all your communications and decision-making activities.
  • Multiple views and report formats to surface product insights, including:
    • Feature View: Logical, functional groupings of features connected to the challenges they address and the resulting benefits.
    • Persona & Use Case View: Business challenges faced by given personas and the features of your product that solve them.
    • Target Audience View: Organizational needs, challenges, and attributes linked to how your product addresses them.

Single Source of Truth for Product Communications.

Align your communications with your vision, strategy, and technical truth.

Challenges: Not everyone needs to know everything about your product, but everyone needs to speak with the same voice, using the same facts.

Solution: Working with your stakeholders, OSP helps clarify and build a collaborative understanding of what your product is, what it does, how it delivers value, and to whom.

Benefits: Keep your whole organization on message with consistent communications true to the facts under the hood while taking up less of your technical team’s time in onboarding, explaining, and helping others.

Relevant Value Map Features

  • Repository of agreed-upon terms, language, concepts, and accurate, up-to-date product information.
  • Buy-in: Ideally, a diverse and representative range of stakeholder roles — technical, business, design, project management, etc. — participate in preparing your Value Map (and later sign-off and approval).
  • Shared Vision: Cross-disciplinary input and discussion while preparing the Value Map build bridges between the different people, departments, and roles involved. Later, this helps them pull in the same direction, to everyone’s benefit.
  • The Value Map stores benefits, challenges, personas, and more for reworking and recombining in your communications.
    • For Marketers: Fact-check your content (and much more!).
    • For Sales-Engineers: Answer client questions, quickly pivot during sales calls, prepare sales decks, battle cards, (and much more!).
    • For Product Owners: Inform your teams about new features, update product documentation with new releases, develop your roadmap, (and much more!).

Search, Sort, Study your Product.

Well-organized and accessible data generates insights and value.

Challenges: Product data and customer research harbor great potential to deliver insights, but the more data you have, the more difficult it is to bring it all together and use it.

Solution: Sort and study your product through the lenses of its features, the challenges it addresses, the benefits it delivers, and the needs of your target personas.

Benefits: Structured access to all your product information lets all stakeholders populate sales materials, content marketing assets, technical roadmaps, and more with impactful, factual arguments.

Relevant Value Map Features

  • Search, filter, sort, and study your product from many angles.
  • Limitless view and filter options by mapping important relationships across entities.
  • Everyone can access the standard views and create custom filters and views for specific use cases.
  • All of your raw product data, connections, and relationships at your fingertips.
  • Example Views:
    • For Marketers and Project Owners: Features organized into logical, functional groupings to populate editorial plans or help roadmap planning.
    • For Sales Engineers and Account Execs: Feature groups filtered by Persona to plan demos, presentations, or determine new cross-sell or upsell opportunities.
    • For Sales Engineers and Account Execs: Challenges relevant to a specific industry vertical.
    • For Sales and Marketing teams: Challenges organized by Persona, then by Feature Area & Category

Tracking your Technical Truth.

Stick to the facts as the facts change with every release.

Challenges: It is a big job to capture the information about product features, benefits, and the challenges they solve. Updating it all for every release is a massive one. Following up across published communication assets and channels is ... gargantuan.

Solution: The OSP Value Map is your structure for capturing all product information. Update your Value Map based on the release notes for every new version and patch. Tag every feature in the Value Map with a version number, and you can be ready to communicate the benefits of new features immediately, update relevant content, and unpublish deprecated materials.

Benefits: Couple your content lifecycle with your product development cycle. Keeping everyone in the loop about changes and additions benefits all stakeholders, from Sales, to Support, to Marketing, to your customers.

Relevant Value Map Features

  • Keep team members and other stakeholders up-to-date as your product evolves
  • Tag features, benefits, and other entities with the product version(s) they apply to
  • Compare and bring your editorial coverage in sync with your strategic priorities.
  • Keep product materials — documentation, blogs, tutorials, etc. — up-to-date and relevant.
  • Trace the connection between (older) content and an evolving product roadmap.
  • Make a new-release communication plan and asset templates for release notes, promotion, etc.

Better collaboration, sales & onboarding

Unified product data accelerates asynchronous collaboration.

Challenge: siloed information

Challenge

Siloed information stored in multiple systems  blocks onboarding, remote collaboration, and sales. Teams either have to act without the whole picture, or wait for time zones and calendars to align before they can get up to speed.

Solution: Library

Solution

A living library of your product’s truth — technical information, target personas, published assets, etc. — enables self-service research and preparation.

Benefit: Empower teams

Benefits

Empower team members — current and new — to gain or refresh product knowledge quickly and efficiently so they can start delivering value, making sales, or contributing sooner.

What do we mean when we say, "Better Collaboration, Sales & Onboarding"?

The OSP Value Map gives you:

Sales Enablement.

Connect customers’ business challenges to your product’s technical truth.

Challenges: Complex products with many features are a huge communication challenge, from selling and writing about them, to onboarding new team members and planning roadmaps. You need consistent (simple) stories and easy access to relevant information.

Solution: Effective sales are based on building trust. You need to recognize and address customer challenges, then provide technically accurate answers quickly and confidently.

Benefits: Prepare for calls, create sales decks, pitches, and demos quickly, accurately, and consistently from your comprehensive inventory of product features and benefits. Call up new information on the fly and pivot during a sales call or demo. Easily complete RFPs (or answer questions for one).

Relevant Value Map Features

  • Your Sales and Marketing teams can work with the facts, what we like to call your “technical truth.”
  • Connect customer challenges to solutions.
  • Accurate, up-to-date inventory of challenges relevant to a given persona or organization type and the product features that solve them.
  • Export relevant product information into your content templates and working documents in just a few clicks.
  • Reduced demand on senior staff during onboarding thanks to your repository and inventory of accurate, up-to-date product information.
  • Create self-service or guided onboarding guides based on your Value Map.
  • Repository and inventory of accurate, up-to-date product information.
  • Search, filter, sort, and study your product from many angles.
  • Your Value Map can include an index of all reference material sources.
  • The Value Map helps you find all those details you don’t have in your head.

Increased Productivity for Asynchronous Teams.

Speed your team communications regardless of your time zones.

Challenges: Siloed product knowledge, whether locked in a senior role’s head or in a document you don’t have access to, crushes productivity and potentially productive time gets wasted asking for information or in meetings.

Solution: Give all teams and roles easy, equal access to your product information linked to relevant information (features, personas, benefits, etc.) and internal or external content assets (documentation, blogs, tutorials, videos, battle cards, data sheets, etc.) tagged by version.

Benefits: Improved autonomous and asynchronous workflows. Self-service product information speeds up everyone’s ability to get work done. Plus: Unblock your teams from time zone tyranny! Never have to wait for your team lead or product owner to wake up and get online again.

Relevant Value Map Features

  • Single source of technical and product truth.
  • Content assets linked to relevant product aspects: version, feature, persona, etc.
  • Easy, central access for all teams and roles.
  • Search, filter, sort, and study your product from many angles.
  • Limitless view and filter options by mapping every important relationship across entities.
  • Everyone can access standard views and create custom filters and views for specific use cases.
  • All of your raw product data and relationships at your fingertips.

Faster, more Self-Service Onboarding.

Get new team members up to speed faster.

Challenges: When new people join your team, or return to a complex project after time away from it, getting them up to speed can be time-consuming. This is especially true if product information is stored in multiple systems, formats, and in varying degrees of relevance. The less structured and maintained the necessary information, the more time the new people will need from important senior technical staff before they can deliver value.

Solution: The Value Map is your comprehensive repository of accurate, up-to-date product information compiled and agreed upon by all relevant stakeholders.

Benefits: The easier it is to access reliable information, the less demand you need to place on senior staff time, the easier it is to progress to autonomy and mastery, and the quicker you can create effective communications or make informed strategic decisions.

Relevant Value Map Features

  • Reduced demand on senior staff during onboarding thanks to your repository and inventory of accurate, up-to-date product information.
  • Create self-service or guided onboarding guides based on your Value Map.
  • Repository and inventory of accurate, up-to-date product information.
  • Search, filter, sort, and study your product from many angles.
  • Your Value Map can include an index of all reference material sources.
  • The Value Map helps you find all those details you don’t have in your head.

Collaboration, Buy-In, Common Vision.

Working together across roles and teams generates buy-in to a shared vision of your product.

Challenges: Creating product positioning and communications based on siloed processes — for example, leaving out key stakeholders from the tech or business sides of the house — you can end up with messaging that is inaccurate, hyperbolic, inconsistent with your technical truth, or incomplete.

Solution: OSP Value Mapping is a collaborative process, ideally involving all stakeholders — technical, business, design, etc. Together, we collect, debate, and distill facts and perspectives to arrive at a unified vision and representation of your product.

Benefits: You get a single source of truth for consistent messaging and planning, in which everyone can see themselves and their needs reflected.

Relevant Value Map Features

  • Value Mapping begins with key stakeholder interviews and cross-team, cross-disciplinary workshops. The latter can be incredible venues for inspiration and cross-pollination (and the resulting valuable information) between people who don’t work with each other on a day-to-day basis.
  • Auditing existing technical, marketing, sales, and leadership materials yields the initial data and insights for your Value Map.
  • Inviting everyone involved to provide input and feedback throughout the entire Value Mapping process ensures that the results are comprehensive and balanced.

Testimonial

Bernd Hepberger

The Value Map forced us to be super clear and focused. Until that event, we kept repeating arguments that were kind of weak. OSP pushed us to be more precise — they forced us to make bolder statements, be more confident, and position ourselves more clearly.

We gave lots of input, OSP provided the methodology and a really structured process from the beginning. It was quicker than I feared it would be.

I feel very good about the Value Map. Everything around it was super, super helpful for us, a real eye-opener.

– Bernd Hepberger, CEO, MASSIVE ART WebServices GmbH

Contact

+491773068591 hello@openstrategypartners.com