Prototype Visualizations

This pulls the goals, potential problems, and hypothesized solutions from a Google Sheet (in theory, it also could pull from Notion, as the spreadsheet structure lends itself to Notion’s database structure) and then does some visualization of them. This is just a first crack.

This is interactive. Mouseover a node to see details. Double-click to collapse/expand nodes. Drag a node if you’re feeling truly adventurous.

Option 1: Network Diagram

This is a little bit of a tangent, but, from a “telling the story,” let’s actually look at a network diagram…that doesn’t have the “glue” of problems connecting goals and solutions.

The talk track would be, “Organizations often have some goals, and then they tackle a lot of solutions in a somewhat scattershot way without having real clarity of how the solutions they’re implementing tie back to those goals.”

I’d be inclined to label the blue squares as “solution” or “activity” rather than “Solution Hypothesis”—that was just going to require more coding that seemed worth it to illustrate the idea.

Now the actual proposed visualization. Think of this through two lenses:

• As the follow-on to the above in a prospect call: “If we apply a lens of problems, we can then bring focus and structure to the efforts…”

• As a way to provide an abstracted visualization of the detail embedded in a monster table of goals, potential problems, and hypothesized solutions.

For the latter, additional layers that could be visualized through size, color, outlines, etc.:

• Potential problems that have been elevated to be a PMWS
• The size/scale/weight/score of problems
• The size/scale/score of hypothesized solutions
• The hypothesized solutions that are in progress vs. ones that are in the backlog vs. ones that have been deferred

Also, this has some interactivity: dragging, double-clicking, mouseover. That’s kinda’ incidental, but seemed worth calling out.

Option 1A

Maybe worth throwing in a slight variation to the above, which is a more hierarchical view of the same idea (the layout of the solution hypotheses is perplexingly inefficient, but you get the idea):

Option 2

Even more work is needed for this one, but the idea would be to do a simple horizontal tree—shown here as a Sankey chart, but could be a more conventional tree, too, which, presumably, would be something like Option 1A above?

(Obviously, the text is way too small here and overlaps and would need to wrap… and a Sankey chart isn’t necessarily the most appropriate choice.)