When starting a new role, create a relationship map to identify your company's key people and resources to prioritize relationship-building efforts.
A relationship map is a diagram of your organization's essential teams, people, and resources.
Definition: Relationship maps show a limited number of people across many teams bounded by your position in the corporate hierarchy. They describe relevant resources under the control of these individuals, how they might help each other, and the manager of that person or team.
Unlike stakeholder maps, relationship maps consider the entire organization, not just people on a specific project. They also differ from organizational charts as they're not comprehensive listings of reporting structures
A relationship map is a diagram of your organization's essential teams, people, and resources.
Creating a relationship map helps UX professionals in several ways:
Identify gaps & risks. Relationship maps highlight gaps in your understanding of your colleagues. If you have trouble filling out the map details, that’s a sign you need to do some research or interact with colleagues and ask them targeted questions. This work will also provide insight into internal conflicts and UX skeptics (or allies) that may affect your future UX projects.
Clarify priorities. Relationships require at least some effort to develop and maintain, but not all work relationships offer the same benefits. Relationship maps force you to reckon with the reality of your finite resources and acknowledge colleagues' influence over your UX role. Whom you prefer to associate with may not align with those you need to associate with to be successful.
Easier recall. A well-crafted visualization is easier to reference than fragmented conversations with your boss or colleagues. Even a mid-sized organization has too many potential relationships to track in your head.
Efficient onboarding and tracking. UX managers can prepare their new employee’s initial relationship map well before their start date. The relationship map can also help UX managers or supervisors coach employees and track their efforts to integrate into the organization.
Why bother going to such lengths to map work relationships? Because junior UX professionals (and some stubborn senior ones) may devalue the importance of these relationships, despite their various benefits to UX professionals:
Improved impact: UX jobs are highly collaborative. Unlike a salesperson acquiring a new customer for an organization, typical UX deliverables like journey maps, prototypes, research reports, and design systems rarely produce immediate and obviously beneficial outcomes by themselves. UX contributions typically require our colleagues to process and act upon them in order to generate long-term value. In addition, your impeccably executed UX research will have diminished influence if your colleagues don't trust you.