Glossary/Methodologies and Frameworks

Customer Results Map

May 27, 2026·By Jeff Moss

The universal, per-ICP, company-branded worldview that captures what a customer is trying to achieve regardless of any product. Eleven semantic dimensions composed into a single decision filter: outcomes, measurement benchmarks (poor/good/great), ranked actions, products, use cases, personas, workflows, pathways, risk, mission, rollout. The Customer Results Map is the universal artifact; the Customer Strategy Planner is that Map applied to one specific customer (phased, customer-branded). Map and Planner are two distinct objects, not interchangeable.

"The customer results map is the most important document and exercise for any business, because it is the ultimate judge that enables every other thing that you do for your customer."

What it is

The Customer Results Map is the universal, per-ICP, company-branded worldview that captures what a customer is trying to achieve regardless of any specific product. It is the foundational artifact of Customer Domain Expertise.

The Map is not a passive document or a dashboard. It is a reconciliation engine, a decision filter the operator runs every product, feature, and play through. The whole chain (outcome to metric to action to product) is visible at once, so every decision goes through one question: which customer outcome does this drive, which metric, which action? A feature that maps to no customer outcome does not get built.

Eleven semantic dimensions compose the Map: the outcomes the customer cares about (regardless of any product's existence), how they measure those outcomes with poor / good / great benchmarks, what actions drive the outcomes (in-product and out-of-product), which personas matter and what their responsibilities are, how they operate (workflows), where they are going (pathways), what derails them (risk), why it matters (mission), and how change rolls through their organization (rollout).

The ranking of actions (CORE 1, 2, 3) is itself the expertise. An unranked list of everything that could be done is not. The discipline is to distill each outcome down to the two or three actions with the highest impact, then order them by impact constrained by prerequisites.

The Customer Results Map is universal, per-ICP, company-branded: one Map per Ideal Customer Profile, reused across customers in that ICP. That Map applied to one specific customer becomes the Customer Strategy Planner: phased, customer-branded, used by the customer-facing operator to plan and execute that customer's value progression. Multiple Strategy Planners can run off one Map (one per customer in that ICP). Map and Planner are two distinct objects; they are not interchangeable.

ICP and fit fall out of the Map. A customer whose business needs three or more of the outcomes on your Results Map is an ICP customer. Two outcomes is secondary fit. One is emerging. The fit scale is an expansion ladder: moving a customer from one to two to three live outcomes is expansion.

Source: methodology-canon/methodology-reference.md > Customer Domain Expertise (the reconciliation-engine framing) + modules/theory-of-the-results-map.md (the foundational reasoning) + modules/universal-results-map.md (the Map vs Planner distinction)

Key Takeaways

•The Customer Results Map is a reconciliation engine, a decision filter the operator runs every product, feature, and play through. Not a passive document or a dashboard.
•It is universal, per-ICP, and company-branded: one Map per Ideal Customer Profile, reused across customers in that ICP.
•The Customer Strategy Planner is the Map applied to one specific customer: phased, customer-branded. Multiple Planners can run off one Map.
•Eleven semantic dimensions compose the Map. The ranking of actions (CORE 1, 2, 3) is itself the expertise; an unranked list is not.
•ICP and fit fall out of the Map: 3+ outcomes = ICP, 2 = secondary, 1 = emerging. The fit scale is an expansion ladder.

The Mistake Everybody Makes

Treating the Customer Results Map as a static reference document. The whole point is that the Map is an active filter: every decision (which feature to build, which playbook to run, which expansion to pitch) goes through one question, which customer outcome does this drive, which metric, which action? A feature that maps to no customer outcome does not get built. The Map's value is the friction it creates when something does not fit, not the comfort of having a document.

How to Apply

1.Pick a real customer segment and build the Results Map for it. One Map per ICP.
2.Force the metrics to be measurable with poor / good / great benchmarks.
3.Rank the actions (CORE 1, 2, 3) rather than listing them. The ranking is the expertise.
4.Lock the Map in with your team as the canonical reference.
5.When a specific customer's strategy needs phasing, render the Map into a per-customer Customer Strategy Planner: same substance, phased and branded to that customer's worldview.
6.Use the Map to grade ICP fit (3+ outcomes = ICP, 2 = secondary, 1 = emerging). Update the Map as you learn; it is a living model, not a static one.

Examples

My dad and the 23 fields

My dad became a first-time shopping mall manager in the 1990s. He had been promoted from operations into a role with no playbook. Corporate executives would visit each quarter and grill him on performance metrics he could not answer: foot traffic by hour, tenant rent-to-sales ratios, vacancy timelines, mall-wide promo lift. He started writing down every question they asked. After several visits, he had a list. He identified 23 fields that covered every executive question he had ever been asked, and manually built a spreadsheet template to populate them consistently across properties. He shared it across the company. The CEO of a multi-billion-dollar real estate firm saw it and made him Head of IT. The lesson I took from watching him do this: knowing the right few fields matters more than the technology. A Customer Results Map is the right few fields, locked in as the reconciliation engine you run every decision through.

Where Used in Product

Methodology:The Customer Results Map composer is the primary product surface for Customer Domain Expertise.
Coaching:The AI coach grounds every customer-facing recommendation in the customer's Results Map.
Export:PPTX and PDF exports pull from the Map plus the per-customer Strategy Planner.

Jeff Moss

Founder, Expansion Playbooks. A decade studying customer retention and expansion data from 75+ recurring revenue businesses.

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