A 2022 Company Initiative
As we grow our new company, we’ll intensify our focus on alignment and consistency across the organization. One way to address this need is through a JMP taxonomy. Providing clear classification, along with several other projects, will be critical to how our company scales up business.
“I think this is a crucial topic. It allows us to, if nothing else, organize or get our stories straight. This will allow us to globally agree and define what our value is, have a seamless articulation of that value proposition - from a web page all the way through to a sales conversation.”
-- Ian Cox, Director, Pre-Sales Support
What is a taxonomy?
The way JMP centrally defines and classifies things such as our core markets and our core capabilities. This taxonomy will be a universal, globally agreed upon naming convention to apply broadly across the company and its systems.
Why should we do this?
This taxonomy project will streamline internal operations and provide clear paths for our customers to find the resources that meet their needs. A couple of prominent use cases include:
- Align sales resources and marketing campaigns to customer challenges
- Spend less time searching for things with better content structure, organization and alignment across systems/departments
- Identify content gaps more easily and manage content lifecycles so that we are providing the most relevant, up-to-date information about the value of JMP
- Provide a map for sales onboarding and training
- Provide guidance in development prioritization
- Help drive message consistency to our core markets
What are we classifying and where?
Here’s the list of labels we are classifying and systems we will implement them in, starting with the items in blue.
What’s the goal?
This year’s taxonomy deliverables will result in four main outcomes:
- A clear representation of our how our core markets map to our products and capabilities
- One universal (and filterable) inventory of our assets (system is still TBD)
- Different systems utilizing taxonomy labels for consistency and ease of search
- The taxonomy becomes central to our processes
What value will this bring our company?
Once we establish a taxonomy and integrate it into our processes, we’ll be able to do many valuable things. For example, we’ll be able to provide:
- Users with an easy way to find different capabilities in the product, as well as associated training opportunities
- Guidance on development priorities based on customer requests that are organized by industry and role
- The best screenshots to represent the work of a specific type of customer or industry
- Clear information to field marketing about what software features and marketing materials to use and when
What is the rollout plan?
Sometimes you must go slow to go fast. And because this will touch almost every group in the company in terms of how they communicate and document work, we are rolling this out in a phased approach. Here’s a general timeline:
Want to learn more?
Visit the taxonomy project page and watch this recording for more details. Or feel free to reach out to me with suggestions.
Who’s involved in this project?
Product Management has strong partnerships throughout the company. Thank you to everyone supporting this effort.
- Ian Cox
- Pin Hu
- Valérie Nedbal
- Laura Higgins
- Phil Kay
- Brady Brady
- Mary Loveless
- Hyde Miller
- Bill Worley
- Chris Kirchberg
- Jian Cao
- Nick Shelton
- Peter Polito
- Mark Zwald
- Larry LaRusso
- Ryan Gilmore
- Aaron Kennedy
Great project.
Its outcome will generate incredible added value for the entire organization.
I cant wait for the result. This is great! Thanks guys 
Thanks so much for working on this project, everyone! I think it will be very valuable to cascade these taxonomy categories as Labels/tags on PM requirements, Jira issues and Confluence feature pages to help make the connection between features and industries where JMP is an important tool.
