New ways to slice your maturity data, and a cross-departmental nudge on use cases
Last week's note covered the big foundation work on both sides — multi-plant hierarchy and the anonymity-by-default heatmap on mfg-surveys, Use Case Families and a big KPI catalog expansion on mfgusecases. This week's additions sit on top of that foundation: lighter, more refined, mostly about getting more insight out of the same underlying data.
Highlights — mfg-surveys.com
- Heatmap dimension toggle: Department, Plant, or Role. The Company Maturity Heatmap now has a Group by toggle. Same data, three lenses: Department (where's our weakest function?), Plant (which facility is the outlier?), or Role / Level (do executives and frontline see the same maturity, or is there a perception gap?). The k-anonymity rule applies identically on all three lenses — sub-threshold groups still fold into "Other" with singleton absorption. The Role / Level view is often the most diagnostic; frontline and Supervisors typically score standard work and daily management much lower than VPs do, and that gap is invisible on the Department view.
- Plant Comparison radar on the corporate Company Settings page. Each plant's pillar maturity overlaid on a single spider chart. Useful for "are our plants converging or diverging?" — the shape tells you immediately. Only appears when a company has 2+ plants and at least one assessment with data; single-location customers see nothing new on their settings page.
- Home page hero refresh. The mfg-surveys.com landing page now shows a stylized two-axis spider chart on the right — maturity and importance overlaid — tagged "Sample profile." The unique two-axis analytical view is now the first visual a visitor sees.
Highlights — mfgusecases.com
- Filter audit and Stakeholder Group removal. A 90-day audit of browse filter click-through revealed that Stakeholder Group (39 values, dense overlap with Department) accounted for only 1.7% of filter clicks across the corpus. It's been removed from the browse sidebar and the use case page chip row. Industry (20% of clicks) and Competitive Advantage (23%) both stay — those are real, used filters. The Guide page on site organization is back to seven navigation dimensions. The dimension and tag values still exist in the database, so nothing's destructive; we just stopped surfacing it.
- "More in this family" card on use case pages. A small sidebar card now sits next to the Related Use Cases widget, showing the count of other use cases in the same family and linking to the family-filtered browse view. It's a more intentional path into the cross-departmental view than relying on people noticing the family chip in the hero. If you're reading a Quality accountability use case, the card tells you there are 23 more accountability use cases across other departments and gets you to them in one click.
- Layout polish. The use case page right column had a pre-existing visual bug where the At a Glance card and the Save card were both stickied to the same top offset, causing them to overlap on scroll. Fixed: only Save is sticky now (which makes sense — it's the action card you want persistently visible). At a Glance and the Related / Family cards below it now scroll naturally.
Coming soon
- mfg-surveys.com: right-to-erasure flow for user-driven response deletion, plus the public privacy notice page to spell out the policy in detail. Plant management actions for editing, removing, and switching admin context between plants.
- mfgusecases.com: Topics dimension (capturing the rank-2 and rank-3 family classifications as cross-cutting practice tags), reconciliation actions on the canonical merge/split candidates surfaced by clustering, and a KPI graph polish pass to account for the denser strategic-goals layer after Sprint 26's L2 expansion.
Questions, feedback, or want to chat about whether either platform fits your operation? Reply to this email — we read everything.
— Tim Stuart, Visual Decisions