Challenge

I am a member of the product development team in my company. We are “shared resources”  that support projects for all different parts of the organization. We usually take part in these  projects as part of a multidisciplinary team as project managers.  In one of our recent projects,  led by the sales organization, we had the objective of increasing the adoption of a certain sales  tool. We use this sales tool in our shops to present, review, collect and sign all required  documentation (e.g. contracts, IDs…) in digital format as opposed to physical format. We knew  that we had a low usage rate but we did not know much more. We did not know which issues  the tool had nor how to prioritize them. We also had the issue of presenting information to  our stakeholders in an accessible way, not as a huge report

Selection

We decided to use mind mapping as a tool to achieve a common understanding of the  situation, identify pain points and their root causes and agree on the drivers that were  conspiring against the adoption of the tool. To do so, we built the ideal customer journey our  customers follow in our shops and contrasted it with all the different real world cases that we  found. This would help us identify the real issues as well as to build the design criteria for  ideation.

Application

We started by immersing ourselves deeply in the problem. To do so we interviewed 10 shop  clerks to understand their point of view. We visited and observed 3 shops’ activity for 2 days.  We also asked real customers about their experience of the sale process and using the sales  tool. We then interviewed the IT people in charge of the tool to understand what was  happening behind the scenes for all the different cases that we have found in real life.

We then built our customer journey map in a large wall-sized panel and divided it in three  rows. On the top row, we placed the ideal customer journey, the step-by-step process that  showed how a customer proceeds to a purchase and how the sale is finished in the shop. In  the second row, we used sticky notes to lay out all the knowledge that we had gathered from  the different steps when using traditional documentation (physical format). In the third row,  we did the same exercise but this time with the digital documentation. For both rows we  recorded all the relevant pieces of data that we had gathered during our research: issues  encountered, what made our customers happy, what made them nervous, how much time did  they spend in-store, what did our sales reps did with that documentation, what our sales reps  told them during the process…

We then run a workshop with sales executives to identify and agree on the issues that we  wanted to tackle with the project. We started by introducing the workshop and what we  expected from them. Then we let them inspect the customer journey and all the pieces of data  silently for 45 minutes. We asked them to summarize any learning that they thought was  relevant using sticky notes to ensure that they kept it brief. Then, we used a similarly sized  panel opposite to our customer journeys to put all our sticky notes.

During 30 minutes, we clustered all similarly themed insights in groups that we proceeded to  summarize. We also connected those clusters that we thought had a relationship among them.  Finally, we discussed the different clusters during the next hour in which we uncovered the  insights behind the themes. We used the “so what” technique described in week’s three video

“mind mapping tool” to force the group to think deeply of the implications of the observations  and the theme of each cluster.

Insight

The most striking outcome was the diversity of the insights that we got. The resulting clusters  were in many cases “human” issues that we needed to solve to drive adoption (e.g. sometimes  the sales rep did not know how to use the tool, customers did not know most of the time why  they were giving their IDs…). However, we also discovered some technical issues that the  company was not aware of (e.g. sometimes it took more than 10 minutes to upload the  documentation). Ultimately, what made the exercise very rich was that we also unearthed  some positive aspects of the current solution that customers and sales reps liked (e.g.  customers loved that the process seemed safer, when it was fast it was preferred to the  traditional process…). This enabled us to develop a richer solution not only focusing on fixing  issues but also extending the aspects that everyone loved.

The ability of mind mapping to be used to not only gather issues but also positive points and  link it to their deep meaning makes it a great tool. The executives that attended the workshop  were enamored with the results. They have asked for the involvement of design thinking in  other projects raising the visibility of the technique and the profile of our group.

Approach

In retrospective, I was too focused on the issues that we needed to fix during the introduction  of the workshop. Only through the initiative of the attendees, we were able to also point to  the positive pieces of feedback that we have received. I believe we picked the right tool for the  job, but next time I will focus on learnings when presenting the objectives of the workshop and  not on issues. I believe this will encourage the team to pick all relevant feedback (positive and  negative) that may help us enrich the solution.

