Course Assignment: Mind Mapping Elements

1. Challenge:

Our company is into service industry. Over the past 10 years, we launched many  products. It was in 2012 we hired an agency that helped us implement agile  methodologies. They introduced us to Jira, groomed a project manager for the Scrum  Master role and implemented daily stand up meetings, sprint reviews, and more.  However, it was very new for the entire team and there remained some challenges such  as the way the management thinks and perceives building products using agile.    The organisation has always been frugal, believed in learning new things from time to  time, and be really quick at adapting to changing environments.    Having said that, since the teams have to deliver things at a great speed, this always  results in them picking up a lot of tasks. Also, due to the frugal nature of the organisation  and limited resources, they’re always kind of short of time. The teams also think that the  time spent on meetings could be utilised elsewhere such as coding for the product. Due  to this, many a times they build features that could be much stronger had they done  more brainstorming and followed the design thinking process such as ideation and  customer empathy sessions. The management is also unaware of the best practices to  follow – and one that I picked up is Mind-Mapping. I also strongly feel that if they gete  convinced about the global best practices, it would be easy to buy more time from  stakeholders for building great products.    I interviewed about 10 people for the product we had recently launched internally to a  limited group of 50 people. And as expected, that gave us a lot of insights. We realised  that to make real sense of so much of data, mind-mapping would be the next right step  to solve problems of building great products.

2. Selection:

I am also a fan of the IDEO CEO who says, “If he has to do something analytics, he  creates a list, but he has to do something more creative, he creates a mind-map”. This is  why I selected mind-mapping tool because there was so much of information in each  interview. I also used the product management user interview framework. Mind-mapping  also helped me connect the dots in the information received from multiple users.

3. Application:

The product manager and a group of other 4 people from the team working on the  product got into a room. The info that was in Microsoft excel, collected through the  interviews process was projected on screen and we started breaking them down to small  features and bugs on sticky notes. Once that was done, we categorized and prioritised  them. The first meeting also brought up a lot of questions as it was our first time but that  also helped us go through the material online to make sure we fully understand the  process. An announcement was made that these meetings would be held more often.

4. Insight:

There were eye-opening insights during this entire process. We got to know the top 3  reasons why the users would not engage with the product as we’d anticipate them to,  and also about what they currently love about in the product. We found their objections  and heard what they didn’t say during the interviews. We then mapped all the pointers  and what kind of impact they have. It really helped us write well though stories and  helped us in effective prioritization.

5. Approach:

I think we will need to work on our brainstorming sessions and improve them in future so  we can do better mind-mapping with the team. We realize that this will save us a lot of  time. And, we will also show the management 4-5 successful mind-mapping meetings  with their outcome to bring them in confidence. This will generate great result and we will  be able to get their buy-in so we can implement agile in the organisation in true sense.

