Jeffrey A. “jam” McGuire: The Value Map Content Framework – Episode 211

Content Strategy Insights

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Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire Aligning and orchestrating product content for complex business use cases is much easier when you have a framework to structure and guide your efforts. Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire and his business partner developed the "value map" framework to structure and organize product marketing information. This helps them to align internal stakeholders on strategy and messaging and to efficiently deliver the right content to both business and technical users of the product. We talked about: his role as Partner at Open Strategy Partners, his consultancy based in Cologne, Germany, that focuses on marketing for B2B and open-source software companies the origins of his value map framework in the complex marketing services that he delivers in an early client's need for a CMS comparison an oral walk-through of his (very visual) value map diagram how clusters of features in his map provide technical answers to focused business questions his concept of a "value case," and its benefit-challenge-solution structure the role of structured content in the implementation of a value map how value cases serve as "a cheat code for storytelling" because it actually portrays a hero's journey the unique objectives of B2B marketing and the role social proof and face-to-face human interaction in his work a conceptual ascent of his framework pyramid: features and functionality at the base, position and USPs, and then up to guiding principles his methodology for aligning stakeholders around a product's messaging strategy jam's bio Jeffrey A. “jam” McGuire is a Partner at Open Strategy Partners, where he helps organizations communicate and grow, finding and telling the stories that connect their technologies with the value they deliver. He builds on nearly twenty years of experience in open source technology, at the intersection of software, business, and culture. His approach to technology marketing is centered on sharing the human context of complex technology solutions. As co-Founder of the German Drupal Association, community-building is close to Jeffrey’s heart. He enjoys celebrating creators’ expertise and combining storytelling and performance to convey information and motivate his audiences. An experienced public speaker, he has hosted numerous awards ceremonies and delivered dozens of keynotes, 150+ conference presentations, and 220+ podcast interviews in the last 15 years. He’s based in Cologne, Germany. Connect with jam online LinkedIn Open Strategy Partners Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/b5Fg26WuSZs Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 211. When you're taking on huge content challenges in complex business environments, it helps to have a good framework to guide your efforts. Jeffrey A. McGuire, known as "jam" in the content marketing and open-source software communities, has developed "value maps" to structure and organize product information. Content strategists and creators then simply follow the map to address the needs of both business and technical users of the product. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 211 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Jeffrey A. McGuire. Jeffrey, he's known as Jam in the communities that I know him from, the open-source software and CMS communities. He's a partner at Open Strategy Partners, a consultancy that he runs. So welcome, Jam. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're doing these days. jam: Hey, Larry. I'm really thrilled to be here talking with you, and I have no idea how we're going to cram... A half an hour is never going to be enough, I'm just saying that. And let's see, about me, I live in Cologne, Germany and I consider it my home. And at the time of recording, we've just finished Carnival for 2025. And the number 11 is a very special number in Cologne, so I'm thrilled to be on episode number 211. Larry: Oh, I did not make that connection. I was just in Cologne at the holidays for Christmas markets and learned a lot about that 11 stuff. That's a whole other... Which we've already had that conversation. That's fun. So, Jam, I can't remember which gathering it was, but you presented about this value map framework that you use to work with the content marketing content that you work with so much. So it's very visual, so this is going to be a little bit of a challenge, but I want to convey this in the form of a podcast as best we can because I'm just a sucker for a good framework. So talk a little bit about, how did this thing even come about? Where did the value map framework come from? jam: Open Strategy Partners has been in business for more than eight years now, and we serve B2B technology companies and open-source organizations, so imagine SaaS, content management, hosting platform certification and so on, and in general, specialist audience marketing, and generally technical. And I come out of open-source software. I come out of the Drupal community originally. I've been involved in Drupal and TYPO3 and PHP and a lot of other communities. We founded the company to help my friends and peers do better in their businesses by helping them communicate the value of what they do better. jam: We have a very specific meaning when we say we do B2B marketing and technology marketing, and the B2B marketing is not about getting 100,000 clicks to convert to 1,000 redirects to 10 demos to a client. It's about building trust, it's about building authority, it's about, in content marketing terms, consistency and relevance technically. So the first point there is that we operate on the principles of empathy, clarity, and trust. I want to create material that's relevant to the audience and that's easy to consume and that's technically accurate and that'll build up trust over time. jam: And when I say that we are in technology marketing as well as in B2B technology marketing, when I compare that to B2C marketing, I feel that technology marketing needs constant creation and reaffirmation of the context you're operating in. B2C marketing, if I'm selling a hamburger or a shampoo or a car, if you're in the same culture and timeframe as I am, we know the factors that go into choosing a car or food to eat or how to wash your hair. jam: In technology, do you know what the difference is between Kubernetes and Docker and how APIs work and whatever? Maybe not. So my clients are technically oriented businesses often selling very complex products to less technical people. So we have to do a lot of translation between technical complexity and the business value that those things deliver and then tell the stories to at least two kinds of audiences, more technical audiences. If we stick with the software businesses, which is what we do mostly, you know you're talking with developers, you're talking with project managers, you're talking with... And you have to give people real facts written in the real way to build credibility and build trust. And then if you show them features that they're excited to try, hey, presto, they download your thing, they call for a demo, they adopt your open-source project and so on. jam: Decision makers, budget holders, marketers don't necessarily have a technical background, and we need to write content about the same products from a business perspective that says, "You can earn more money or lose less money or be more efficient or deliver better quality." Everybody says they do. We start with the facts of a product and the business value that they deliver, and when we write the business stories, you can go and do your due diligence, and we've built them on fact. There's no hyperbole, there's no vaporware, so we're selling reality. jam: And then the third little piece on the side of our practice is we come from open-source, so our friends and colleagues in all of the open-source world can start with us basically on day one. We understand licensing and community and contribution and a bunch of the special, wonderful concepts about open-source that you can't assume that any given agency down the road will understand. When we got started with Open Strategy Partners in 2016, '17-ish, one of our very early clients wanted a comparison between their open-source CMS and some other CMSs, some of them proprietary, some of them open-source. And my genius co-founder, Tracy Evans, she is definitely the brains behind the operation, and most of the frameworks and most of the ways that we work structurally come from her education experience and background. She's an MBA, she's an internationally experienced manager and leader, and she has a formal education in business marketing and all of these structures. jam: I joke, but I'm also not joking, I've worked in open-source since 2006-ish; I've had 5,000 beers with developers and agency owners and other people, and I've also been in the business and been in a startup and so on, and I came through a technical beginning into communications as a writer and journalism and then through the community path into marketing to where we are now. One of the first big problems that we needed to solve for one of our first big clients was this comparison. Tracy had herself gone through comparison exercises in previous situations in her life and career, and she was a perfect marketing persona because she was the non-technical, budget-holding executive making technology decisions, and if she looked at Drupal, for example, an open-source CMS, the thing that the community homepage said for the long time was something like community plumbing, and she didn't understand why she would be interested in plumbing. And if she dug a little bit deeper, she would find a bunch of features, but it was impossible to tell as a business person what this thing would actually do for you.

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