What if you could have a key that gave you access to brand success and stakeholder alignment across your entire organization? I know, you're thinking, "That is a nice dream, but it will never come true. That sounds like magic."
What if I told you it exists? This key is a domain model—a representation of the concepts in a subject area and the relationships between them. It's quite a simple thing. You don't need a massive investment in time or money to make one. All the instructions are in Designing Connected Content: Plan and Model Digital Products for Today and Tomorrow. But here I'll share some ideas for what this simple diagram can do for your organization.
Domain model for the IA Summit.
Brand Success
What business are you in? Do you know? The best brands in the world know what business they are in—what domain they operate in.
A domain model shows you what matters to people who care about your domain. It gets everyone away from constantly selling and towards creating connections with your audience, who then want to buy your products, make a donation, become an advocate, or join your community.
Here are some examples of successful and well-regarded brands that I've reverse engineered based on their publicly available brand values.
Spotify is in the streaming content business. Not just music anymore. You can get podcasts and tv shows too. If they had stopped at streaming only some music artists, would they have been able to have a successful IPO?
Nike's business is athletes. They don't just make branded sell branded sportswear. Take a look at any of their commercials and you can that the story they tell is how everyone can be an athlete. Athletes need more than sneakers. (And some don't even need those but a bunch of other gear.)
BMW makes driving machines. They make cars and motorcycles. They are now on the forefront of electric vehicles. Why limit yourself to just one type of vehicle when you don't know what will be invented 20, 50, 100 years from now?
Tesla is in the electric vehicle business. It is singularly focused on making vehicles powered by electricity. Because of this focus, it disrupted a century-old industry.
I know someone who created a domain model for a luxury sunglass company. Guess what? They aren't in the sunglass business. Turns out they are in the fashion business! By modeling the fashion domain, they opened up huge content marketing opportunities that allowed them to expand and engage their audience.
Stakeholder Alignment
The domain model's power to align people is the collaborative nature of its creation. This is not something any one person does alone and pushes out to others. A shared understanding gets created by bringing together people for a couple hours and hashing out which domain (or domains, as is often the case) they operate in and what the pieces are to that domain.
People who have incorporated domain modeling into their toolset have said that the most surprising thing they got from it was a common language. Instead of each department using the same word different ways or different words to mean the same thing, they define what words have the appropriate meaning to them—and their audience.
The discussions that happen along the way to creating a domain can themselves lead to new opportunities for an organization. Maybe the software engineers never talked to the marketing folks before. Maybe a product manager sees a new direction to take the product.
“Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains.””
Simple, not easy
A domain model is one of those simple-but-not-easy things. Sure it takes the form of boxes and arrows, but it's the meaning that lies inside those boxes and arrows that is its value.
Determining the domain to model is in itself a valuable lesson. It will help you decide whether you want to be expansive (see Spotify, Nike, BMW) or restrictive (Tesla). There is value in both, but the decision will be best if it is made deliberately.
With a notion of your domain (it often changes as you make the model), you determine what objects are in it. What are they? What to call them? How to define them for your situation? The level of debate and discussion among subject matter experts and others can get pretty philosophical. This is a good sign that you are exploring new depths that may lead to breakthroughs.
How are those objects connected? Once you've made the other decisions, it's relatively easy to define the relationships between them. But don't get too complacent. You may discover you're missing an object because a relationship doesn't make sense or the objects have varying levels of granularity that need to be reconciled.
If you are ready to take your organization to the next level, give domain modeling a try. You never know what you'll find! Facilitating the creation of domain models and teaching teams how to make them part of their practice is one of my favorite types of projects because of all the aha moments that result.
You can learn how to create and use domain models during The IA Conference workshop, Applied Designing Connected Content. The workshop is open even to those who cannot attend the entire conference. Use code WSPK50 for a discount.