Ecosystem map

An ecosystem map shows who and what surrounds an experience. The customer sits somewhere in the middle, and around them are everyone and everything else that touches the outcome: your product, partner products, regulators, retailers, support teams, competitors, the courier. Lines show what flows between them: money, data, goods, responsibility.

It is a map of structure, not of time. Nothing on it happens first.

What it is for

The map exists to show how much of an experience you do not control. A hospital appointment app depends on the clinic’s booking system, the insurer’s rules and the patient’s own calendar. Seeing that dependency drawn out explains why the interface cannot fix some problems by itself, and where a partner conversation would.

It also finds the missing players. Teams routinely discover someone with a large influence on the outcome, such as an installer or a procurement department, who had never been interviewed.

Ecosystem map, relationship map

A relationship map is narrower: it focuses on the links between people, often inside one organisation, and how strong or difficult those links are. An ecosystem map is wider and includes things as well as people.

In practice

Start with the person’s goal in the middle and add actors outward by asking “who or what does this depend on?”. Label the lines with what passes along them, not just that a connection exists. The unlabelled line is the laziest part of this deliverable. It is also the most common one.