Taxonomy Update: A Companywide Initiative
We are well underway with Phase 1 of building JMP’s taxonomy.
The taxonomy is something that will take time to deliver and then refine. Something that will take support from a lot of groups. But also something that is super critical to how we align and scale as a company as it will impact almost all areas of the business.
As we move through the process, we think it’s important to keep the company up to date on where we are and what we eventually hope to achieve. At the same time, thank those who are making this happen.
Phase 1 at a High Level
- Industries: Tackling our some of our largest industries: Chemical, Pharma, Semiconductor, Consumer Products.
- Labels and Maps: For each of these core markets these teams have outlined:
- main functional groups
- major pain points
- questions to ask
- how to position
- how that maps into products, capabilities and platforms.
- Global Teams: We have different teams led by @jiancao, @Laura_Higgins, @Bill_Worley, @nick_shelton, and @PIN have been meeting over the last several months. (full teams listed below).
- Collaboration at its best: Each team has been meeting over the last few months, working with a global group of technical staff to outline their respective industry's labels and maps. These teams have done a tremendous job of bringing their own expertise to help guide the conversation, yet working together to build one central, global list.
- Systems: @Ryan_Gilmore , @Larry_LaRusso . @Aaron_Kennedy have been working in their respective systems and areas so that we can tag content with these fields. Goal is to have Inside JMP, the Resource Center, and the new internal resource center (to be launched in May 2022) all tagged utilizing this taxonomy. With this in place, It will also allow us to connect the right content to the right areas of our website, customers to easily find themselves in our content and in our products, to understand what content we have for what industries, products, capabilities and ensure we are delivering for our core markets in every way.
- Goal completion date: June 1, 2022.
What ‘s next?
- Training and awareness: As these labels and maps are developed we are going to roll this information out to the company by hosting training sessions by industry.
- More systems: Utilizing the same labels, we will continue tagging more systems such as the wishlists (product management), youtube videos and blogs (@arati_mejdal).
- Becoming part of everyone's process: As we build out these lists, labels and maps, we need to ensure that all areas of the company are adopting in the same way. As we mentioned earlier, this will only success if there is consistency.
Is there a Phase 2?
Glad you asked… why yes there is. Once we have the first 5 markets rolled out, we will continue with the second round of industries over the summer months.
Why this matters.
Just a few reasons.... but here are some of the the biggest ones:
- Allows customers to find themselves in our content and in our products.
- Sets the foundation for our overall content and GTM strategy.
- Ensures we are delivering on our core market’s problems – from all areas of the business.
- Drives consistency and alignment throughout the company which will in turn allow us to scale more effectively.
- Makes it easier to search and find resources, internally and externally
Feedback or want to know more?
Visit the taxonomy project page and watch this recording for more details. Or feel free to reach out to me with suggestions.
Huge shoutout and thank you to everyone who is making this happen:
Chemical:
- Bill Worley (Lead)
- Emmanuel Romeu
- Florian Vogt
- Scott Allen
- Yuichi Katsumura
- Joe Reese
- Phil Kay
Consumer Products:
- Jian Cao (Lead)
- Jerry Fish
- Ikju Shin
- Wendy Tseng
- Chris Kirchberg
- Peter Hersh
- Scott Wise
Pharma:
- Laura Higgins (Lead)
- Andrea Combs
- Martin Demel
- DaeYun Kim
- Florence Kussener
- Stuart Little
- Hideaki Miyata
- Christian Stopp
- Byron Wingerd
- Jeff Upton
- Valerie Nedbal
- Sam Gardner
- Don McCormack
- Chandra Ramnarayanan
Semiconductor:
- Pin Hu (Lead)
- Alisa Hunt- Lowry
- Mike Anderson
- Mark Zwald
- Clovis Weisbart
- ChulHee Min
- Hyde Miller
Implementation team (initial group):
- Larry LaRusso
- Ryan Gilmore
- Aaron Kennedy
- Candace Gervase
- Mary Loveless
- Hyde Miller - so good he had to be listed twice
Re: Taxonomy Update: A Companywide InitiativeI am impressed! Super great project and what I like most: This project will simplify the search for relevant content from customers/prospects and for us all internally. Thank you all in advance!
Re: Taxonomy Update: A Companywide InitiativeI'll echo the congratulations given here by so many. So much progress already, with a well-defined roadmap for next steps. It's really exciting.
Having been involved at various stages during this project, I have a sense of just how much work has gone into this effort - largely under the direction of @saradoudt - and I know it's been enormous. (And I'm also VERY confident I'm underestimating that amount!)
Special thanks to the Global Industry Teams who put in countless hours developing this framework, and getting it agreed upon and backed by the entire organization. I'm sure that hasn't been easy. Of course, the next stage - getting our content tagged and surfaced in internal and external channels alike - would be impossible without this high-level pre-work, so thank you. I feel confident we'll now be able to serve up the most relevant and helpful content to our customers and prospects.
BTW, that work has begun; you can trust we'll be reaching out to these teams to confirm that we're surfacing the best of the best.
Thanks again, all!
Re: Taxonomy Update: A Companywide InitiativeI agree with all the previous comments above.
I appreciate the level of effort everyone who contributed in putting this taxonomy together. Great collaboration and teamwork.This information will be a game changer for everyone!
This moves in the right direction to have a common global message. Kudos to everyone involved.
Re: Taxonomy Update: A Companywide InitiativeThanks, Sara, for your tenacity in getting us this far, and thanks also to everyone who has contributed their considerable expertise! Alignment around these messages is going to help focus and amplify our voices across the many channels and markets we're trying to make noise in. Over time, I think this is also going to help us become more agile and efficient by allowing us to share/re-purpose/re-use the best materials, no matter where in the world they were created. Great stuff!
Re: Taxonomy Update: A Companywide InitiativeWow! I can tell that this is a big undertaking, and I want to thank everyone who is involved with this project!
From a sales perspective, I think this is going to be a game changer. It will allow us to understand common challenges by functional area, it will help us be prepared to have better conversations with customers and prospects, it will map their needs to JMP's capabilities, and it will include relevant resources that we can share. This is amazing, and something that will benefit everyone from a brand new hire to a seasoned salesperson.
Great job, and thanks again!
Re: Taxonomy Update: A Companywide InitiativeIt's always so exciting to hear updates on this initiative; thanks for this, Sara.
It's clear that an enormous amount of collaborative work has already happened, and it's really exciting to be closer to seeing all the benefits that even just the shared classification and vocabulary will give us. That alone has been something we've needed for a long time, for sure, and I'll echo Phil in saying that this is really hard, which is perhaps one reason it hasn't been done before at this scale. I think I'm most excited about what Lori mentioned, the direct mapping between function/challenges/capabilities/messaging and the resources supporting it. That feels like the kind of thing that, once we have it, we'll wonder how we ever did without it, and will hopefully bring some needed clarity to our libraries of materials, both internal and external.
Thank you all for the work on this so far.
Re: Taxonomy Update: A Companywide InitiativeA lot of great information in a well organized, consolidated view. Having a direct connection between functional group / challenges / capability and resources presents strong efficiency gains for Sales. Very helpful for cross functional teams, reps moving into new territories as well as new hires.
Great addition for people to connect JMP value message with the appropriate role and industry. Looking forward to trainings and seeing it in action as we move toward version 17 release.
Thanks to everyone involved in the creation process.
Re: Taxonomy Update: A Companywide InitiativeMost of this effort seems geared toward making documentation/training/videos findable by people in relevant industries. Presumably this is because most customers either need just a slice of JMP or are most helped by examples using familiar types of data/terminology/etc.
How many industries do you eventually plan to include? Or will you be adding down to some relevance level (ex. number of customers/licenses in an industry)?
Is there a plan for pushing this into the product? I can imagine:
- tagging platforms with industry tags (assuming not too many industries for any platform depending on the actual UI)
- having filters/modes that hide all uncommon platforms. In preferences, you select (maybe multiselect) the industry tags you want to see. Maybe that affects the platform menus and SI examples.
- having promoted platforms. Same preference, but maybe those platforms get moved to the top menu as a flat list rather than removing unneeded ones.
- Swapping content in the stat index or more generally in the SI to use
- Wizards targeting particular industry tasks that handle a complex task
- Library of Workflows (the new feature) targeting common industry tasks that ship with JMP or are posted on the Community
- Tying somehow into industry websites or data sources. If there is a web based glossary of chemical ingredients, could you have an SI example that pulls that into a table (or a Workflow that could be posted later) or pulldown in JMP somewhere (like new table from...)?
- Would you make it easy to extend so users could augment with their own data sources?
Would there be too much of an increased testing (or tech support) burden if we allowed the product to morph based on the user?
Does it make sense to use this information in Jira as an "importance" factor? I.e. this bug came from a small customer, but in a big market segment. Or just tag them so you can easily run reports by market segment.
Do we have platforms that need to be "skinned" somehow based on the current user's industry? That could be terminology or users in different industries use different types of validation formulas. If we did this, would it cause more problems with testing than it's worth or would it be impossible to come up with a set of behaviors that fits a large group of people.
Re: Taxonomy Update: A Companywide InitiativeAgree Martin! This is such an important initiative, one that wouldn't be possible without amazing global teamwork!
We're already starting to use the taxonomy to tag new features in JMP 17 by industry, functional group (roles) and capabilities. We're also using both the product themes (see Company Goals, under Develop Great Software) and the taxonomy as we work on product roadmaps for JMP 18 and beyond.
Re: Taxonomy Update: A Companywide InitiativeFirst of all, let me say: this is really hard. The breadth of ways that JMP is used in a range of industries is wonderful. And it makes it really hard to capture. Then there is the challenge of variation between different parts of the world. Does "Chemical Engineer" mean the same thing in England, Germany, and Japan?
This is also really important. To spread the use and impact of JMP within science and engineering customers we need to make sure that when we engage with potential users we understand what their challenges are and what they need to know about the value of JMP. I think this is going to be so useful for our sales teams to get a head-start on understanding the value of JMP for their customers. There is no substitute for asking great questions and then listening. This should help getting that conversation started.
In the future, I love the idea that we might be able to automatically point an interested scientist or engineer to personalised content that will tell them why they need JMP. Enabling the buyer in their own exploration of JMP will really help us to scale to 1M users.
Re: Taxonomy Update: A Companywide InitiativeLove the way we act as global team to make JMP even better than it is already! Great worldwide teamwork overcoming even strangest time zone conflicts
