Understanding how business ecosystems work is critical in strategic thinking, particularly when planning new ventures or features. The same thing is true of stakeholders, partners, customers, users. All business is about relationships of some sort. One of my favourite tools for expressing and understanding these relationships is to draw a quick graph. This used to be something that would take considerable time using tools like visio, dia or miro. Nowadays, as with so many things, I reach for Claude.
In the last year or so, models have got much better at simulating this sort of spatial reasoning. In addition, there is a rich vein of visualisation tools that have long been available to the hard-core javascript or python programmer, but which have been unwieldy for a typical business user. Combining this new found visual acuity with the coding skills of a model like Claude, and the artefact system in the Claude desktop app have made it much faster to generate visualisations like this:
Note: while this is very loosely based on a real business case, it has been adjusted significantly and generalised to make a point about business ecosystems. It does not represent any real, current, previous or future plans.
The diagram itself uses a layered graph that Claude built with D3.js. Each node represents a class of participant in the ecosystem like data sources, data owners, the broker platform at the centre, and the various consumers and infrastructure providers on the right. Colour-coded edges distinguish between different types of flow, including data, recurring revenue, one-off payments, product value, with dotted lines for more speculative revenue shares. The flow controls panel on the left lets you toggle each edge type on and off, which is invaluable for cutting through the complexity. You can hide everything except revenue flows and the commercial picture jumps out or switch to data flows only and you see the supply chain underneath. Originally I had a lot of actual companies on the diagram, but chose to make those toggle-able to remove some of the noise. I also added animation for the flows to get a sense of directionality. The graph is great as an overview, but sometimes you want to really see the detail. This is why I added the node and connection panels showing the role, description, and data types each node has. The default layout isn't always perfect, so I asked Claude to make the nodes draggable, so you can get a clearer sense of the relationships.
This example illustrates value flows in a brokered market where commission flows out of the main revenue flow to a marketplace. Because of this I adapted the simple graph pattern to include a kind of Sankey chart approach to the edges. The split edges (actually a hidden intermediate node that enables the split edge) represent the commission flowing on revenue to the marketplace. This provides an intuitive picture of where value and revenue flow for the broker, and illustrates their participation in the ecosystem.
There are two interesting parts to this technique, firstly, the interactive visuals help you explore and understand the ecosystem, but there is also a chat context sat right next to it. The chat was used not just to shape and tweak the visuals, but also to form the relationships. The whole process took about an hour, most of which was the back and forth thinking about how the ecosystem worked, where potential connections could be made, and discussing not just the representation, but also the content.
Often when putting together these kind of joint thinking sessions and using Claude as a discussion partner, I find it useful to instruct the AI to build one of these graph based diagrams to visualise the discussion.
Automating this with a Claude Code Skill
I've packaged this technique into a reusable Claude Code skill so you can generate these diagrams directly from a conversation without any manual setup.
Claude Desktop App
To use this in the Claude Desktop application:
- Download the skill prompt from the release page.
- In Claude Desktop, create a new Project and open its project knowledge settings.
- Paste the skill prompt into the project's custom instructions.
- Start a new conversation within that project — Claude will now have the ecosystem diagramming behaviour built in, and will generate interactive artefacts you can explore directly in the app.
Once installed, you can invoke it by asking Claude to "create a new ecosystem flow diagram". Here's what an actual session looks like:
Step 1: Start the conversation
I can build you an interactive ecosystem flow diagram! To make it useful, I need to understand what you'd like to visualise.
What kind of ecosystem do you want to map?
A) Business/marketplace model B) Technical architecture C) Organisational structure
Step 2: Describe the landscape
Great — a business/marketplace model! To build this out, I need to understand the key pieces:
- What are the main entities/stakeholders? Think in terms of layers: Sources (left) — who creates value or supplies goods/services? Platform/Broker (centre) — who connects buyers and sellers? Consumers (right) — who pays for or receives the end product?
- What flows between them? Data/information flows, money flows (subscriptions? one-time purchases? commissions?), product/service delivery
- Any revenue splits? (e.g., platform takes 15%, rest goes to sellers)
Could you describe your marketplace — even briefly?
Step 3: Get an interactive diagram
Claude takes that brief description and builds a full interactive D3.js visualisation. No templates, no configuration files — it reasons about the structure and generates the entire thing:
Here's your interactive marketplace ecosystem diagram. It maps out:
- 2 Suppliers (left) sending data and paying platform fees to you
- Broker (You) at centre — receiving data from all sides, providing product to suppliers and resellers
- 2 Channel Resellers receiving product and paying channel fees
- 6 End Buyer segments (3 per reseller: Enterprise, SMB, Consumer) — paying resellers with a 5% commission split flowing back to you, plus sending usage data directly to you
Drag nodes to reposition, hover to highlight connected flows, click for detail panels, and use the top-left toggles to show/hide data, revenue, or product flows independently.
This gives the following result:
Step 4: Iterate
From there you can refine through natural conversation — rename entities, adjust weights, add example companies, toggle flow types, or restructure the graph entirely. The skill handles all the layout and rendering updates automatically.
The whole process from a blank prompt to a working interactive diagram typically takes a few minutes, most of which is the strategic thinking rather than the tooling.
More than a diagram tool: a thinking tool
What I find most valuable about this approach is that the diagram is not the end product, it is a thinking tool.
The act of describing an ecosystem to Claude, debating the relationships, and then seeing them laid out visually exposes gaps and assumptions that are easy to miss in a slide deck or a spreadsheet. The interactivity means you can examine your data more dynamically. Having the visual coupled to the chat as well means you're not stuck in the structure of the template here, or in what your diagram tool can do, but you can easily make radical changes to both the content and the presentation in the chat. So it's worth playing with, asking for a redraw, adding features to your diagram on the fly.
There's a very liberating sense of freedom when a prototyping mentality takes over from finished software.
When you are scoping a new product opportunity, even a feature level one, or mapping a competitive landscape, this kind of rapid visual exploration is worth having in your toolkit. It's also a great way to explain complex thinking to stakeholders and gives you an artefact you can share, an interactive artefact that they can explore and play with too.