Adam Zeiner

As a consultant focused on the org design of design orgs, I work across a variety of contexts—established businesses (banks, retail); software as a service (enterprise software); scale-ups (pre-IPO and growing); start-ups. And repeatedly over the past couple of years, I’ve found myself drawing some variation of the following generic digital product... See more

I was personally struck by the uniformity of this thinking across time and discipline – in general, there are six different levels of escalating complexity, each interdependent, each with an important role.Important to note here that in my table, "Leverage" is not the same thing as "Time to complete something."

The new ecosystem design will need to start with the customer’s view and deliver on the agreed-upon value proposition and experience. To achieve this, organizations can consider three domains: consumers, sectors and partners, and products and services. Design has a central role to play in each.

We also need to stop treating them as monolithic models of the entire system. We’re in the digital age now and maps are cheap. There’s no reason we can’t have multiple versions or break our research up into multiple maps, each with a well defined scope and focus.