How Innovatemap uses Whimsical to move product solutions forward

Kate Harrison

Senior Product Manager @ Innovatemap

Summary

Innovatemap is a national digital product agency, partnering with more than 300 SaaS companies to design, launch, and scale digital products. Their product management and design teams ensure their clients are building products users want to use, while their product marketing and brand teams help clients go to market with products people want to buy. Their product teams use Whimsical to shape product ideas and drive alignment throughout the delivery process.

Visuals are the key to alignment

Securing alignment between client partners and teams of product experts is one of the most essential parts of the delivery process for product managers (PMs) at Innovatemap. Throughout this process, they must carefully guide their clients to make decisions on product strategy, functionalities, and design—and they need the right tools to do the job.

To align with their clients, PMs at Innovatemap create a series of visual assets that help share their thinking behind solutions, illustrate proofs of concept, and demonstrate feature dependencies. Since these assets are shared directly with clients, they must be polished and presentation-ready, but they also need to be low-fidelity so that PMs can collect early feedback and implement changes before investing in high-fidelity work. Finding a balance in this dichotomy is a challenge many product teams face.

Most tools aren’t conducive to building "polished" visuals for early-stage product concepts. Innovatemap experimented with numerous canvas and white-boarding tools but struggled to find one that would allow them to quickly translate ideas into presentable product maps, wireframes, or concept diagrams.

Why Innovatemap chose Whimsical

With Whimsical, teams at Innovatemap can easily translate individual ideas and product solutions into collaborative boards to share with their clients. In a matter of minutes, PMs can take an early-stage concept or idea, put it on (virtual) paper, and quickly shape it into a product map, low-fi wireframe, or diagram that carries the level of polish necessary to help a client visualize a product solution.

Plus, features like annotations and comments make it easy for clients to gather additional context or add feedback. Now, teams at Innovatemap can move faster and achieve alignment earlier in the delivery processes, limiting the amount of re-work.

“On the product management side, our work is almost always to help our client partners make a decision that will move their product forward. Whimsical allows us to demonstrate current inefficiencies we see and recommend new frameworks or workflows that will help move their product in the right direction.”

Kate Harrison, Senior Product Manager @ Innovatemap

The benefits of using Whimsical to establish a visual source of truth were immediately evident. The team also quickly discovered that Whimsical's auto-formatting, color coding, and ready-made wireframe elements allowed PMs to draft assets faster because they didn't have to fuss over formatting.

"Although other tools can offer me more visual flexibility, as someone without a design background, it can take me more time to get my file looking presentable," explains Harrison. "With Whimsical, [elements] in a board are instantly well-formatted for me."

A source of truth for product management

Today, Whimsical is an integral part of how Innovatemap shapes product ideas and has become the team’s go-to tool for building visual assets and resources — from user flows, to roadmaps, to brainstorming sessions.

"It's the ultimate place to make Product Management deliverables," explains Harrison. "Throughout our product management process, it's generally a Whimsical file we're working in."

Explore the product map template below to learn how Innovatemap uses Whimsical to move product solutions forward. Ready to start using Whimsical in your product development workflow? Get started for free.

This case study was written by Michelle Johannesson.