Business Thinking for Designers

What are Strategy Maps?
Strategy Maps are one of my favorite business visualizations. 
Simple in structure, a Strategy Map shows the relationships 
between organizational objectives through underlying quality 
perspectives. 
Strategy Maps were originally popularized in the 1990s as part 
of a strategic management framework called The Balanced 
Scorecard. Now they’re a popular tool for describing and 
visualizing business strategies at companies large and small. 
Traditional Strategy Maps connect objectives between the 
four separate perspectives of company health outlined in 
Chapter 2: 
• Financial

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Create conditions for design maturity
• Customer
• Operations
• Learning & growth 
The visualization creates a template for how objectives 
within the different perspectives relate to one another. For 
example, how developing employee skills relates to improved 
operational efficiency, which leads to better customer 
solutions and generates financial value for the company. 
Figure 4-4: A hypothetical example for a business Strategy Map by 
Ryan Rumsey. At first glance, Strategy Maps can be a little daunting, 
but by following the arrows we can see how a host of different 
objectives build on one another.

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The order of perspectives in Strategy Maps matter because it 
indicates priority in trade-off-decision scenarios.