6 Product taxonomy

When moving to independent value streams, it’s essential to start with business and customer outcomes to ensure the design of your organization structure and software architecture are optimized for the highest-priority outcomes. This is important for designing individual value streams and organizing groups of dependent value streams to achieve end-to-end fast flow. A product taxonomy enables this by serving as the vision for your desired socio-technical architecture, driven by each product's business and customer outcomes.

A product taxonomy visualizes the big picture, showing how each part of the architecture fits together. It helps provide visibility across the organization, uncover risks that impact flow, and it’s an excellent foundation for mapping out the modernization opportunities and challenges in each business area. For larger organizations, a taxonomy also helps to deal with organizational and technical complexity at higher levels of scale.

6.1 Defining the building blocks

6.1.1 Independent value streams

6.1.2 Domains

6.1.3 Products

6.1.4 Platforms

6.1.5 Product groups and portfolios

6.1.6 Industry Example: Salesforce product taxonomy (2017)

6.1.7 Building blocks cheat sheet

6.2 Designing the taxonomy

6.2.1 Using appropriate techniques

6.2.2 Starting out with constant evolution in mind

6.2.3 Establishing accountability

6.2.4 Balancing discovery, design, and delivery

6.3 Carefully defining North Stars

6.3.1 Choosing the right North Star

6.3.2 Using a North Star framework

6.3.3 Industry Example: North Stars at Danske

6.4 Mapping modernization opportunities, risks, and challenges

6.4.1 Dependencies and misaligned boundaries

6.4.2 Unclear or lacking ownership

6.4.3 Skills gaps

6.4.4 Product and domain modernization