Applying the Mind Mapping tool early in within the product development process

The Challenge

I am a member of the R&D team at a company which develops products marketed to healthcare  practitioners. R&D and marketing form a cross-functional ‘Core Team’ charged with developing and  launching new products. Very often we identify a novel solution and fit that into a perceived need,  without adequately spending time in the ‘What Is’ phase to truly understand whether this solution will  provide true and new value. The Core Team does come together to hone the product message  however this happens too late, with the best collaboration happening close to the launch when the  product has already been developed, and when marketing and educational materials are being  developed. The company has had many successful launches, but has also launched many products  which had the ingredients for a success which was never fully realized. Time and again, ‘not having the  story right’, is considered the reason that these launches were not as successful as possible. Our  organization is new to Design Thinking, and there is a lot of enthusiasm and openness for its  application within our product development process.

Tool Selection

I chose the Mind Mapping tool for this challenge. I found the video by Anna Moreno particularly helpful  for planning (https://www.coursera.org/learn/uva-darden-design-thinking-innovation/lecture/lsFRa/mind- mapping-tool). As Moreno states in her video, Mind Mapping is “Looking for patterns and  insights in the large quantity of data you collected during the exploration of What Is. The goal is to  establish criteria for the What If idea generation phase, which comes next. This is a pivotal point in the  design thinking process.”

Mind Mapping It is an opportunity to step back and look at the current reality, and distil this into insights  that help to generate the Design Criteria that possible future solutions can be measured against. Mind  Mapping involves creating an ‘Art Gallery’ of all the data collected on a particular topic and displaying it  so that many stakeholders (for example the Core Team, other internal stakeholders, senior  management) can interact with it. Each of these participants will then select data that does and does  not fit with the Design Challenge, and collaborates with the other participants to collate all insights into  themes and eventually create Design Criteria. Mind Mapping captures of the minds of the customers,  and brings together many internal stakeholders around this reality in a way that is ultimately more  engaging than writing or reading a report.

I felt this tool was particularly appropriate for my current challenge, because it not only requires the  team to generate data, but to pause, and really take a step back to analyze this data and look for  themes and patterns, and not rush too quickly into solution generating mode! Also, as mind mapping  deliberately brings together diverse stakeholders, I felt this process would help build engagement  around the power of Design Thinking across multiple teams and levels of the organization.

Application

Following the steps outlined in the Moreno’s video on Mind Mapping, I worked with the core  team to create an ‘Art Gallery’ of data relevant to a key project. We created large posters of data sets  which included information gleaned from practitioner interviews, data on the health condition of interest,  competitive reviews, and practitioner personas information. We hung the posters up in a large  conference room with plenty of good wall space and invited others key internal stakeholder groups  (sales, sales operations, training, IT, marketing communications, education) in addition to senior  management to spend a morning with us reviewing and discussing the data. We had 10 people

participate in total. We told everyone we need their intuition, and spent 15 minutes presenting the  Design Challenge to them, and reminding them that we were not in idea generation mode yet.

We gave everyone a clipboard, a stack of post-it notes and a marker, and gave them 30 minutes to  circulate in the room and review the presented data with the instructions to pick out the information that  they felt fit and didn’t fit he design challenge. We asked them to write each of these on a separate post- it note. When the 30 minutes was up, we all sat and took 10 minutes to review our post-it notes and  then went through a process of grouping all the post-it notes into themes, until all of the information  was on a wall, clustered into clearly labelled themes. After this, we spent time identifying the insights  from each cluster and creating connections among the clusters. We then created Design Criteria based  on these themes.

Insights

Applying the Mind Mapping tool provided a wide range of insights. Firstly, it highlighted the creative  power within the team, and helped to galvanize the team and create positive engagement. The shared  learnings really galvanized the team, and we felt more confidence in each other, the product concept,  and the future development process overall. This felt like a really critical step, and necessary to have  something formally built into our process as previously we would have spent less time evaluating the  true customer needs this early in the process. This made me think that previous development efforts  have been more blind. Using this tool provided a process where a team that was new to Design  Thinking was facilitated to generate and look closely at data. This process also built support for Design  Thinking within the team and also within the organization by increasing engagement. Using this Mind  Mapping tool with currently available data highlighted an opportunity to focus on generating more and  richer data collection during the ‘What Is’ exploration phase. An unanticipated outcome of this process  was to record the critical decision points in the development process, and create a strong historical  record and rationale of why development moved in a specific direction.

Approach

I will continue to apply this tool early in the concept development stage - after identifying a target area  for new product generation or for product renovation, but before any development on a new solution  takes place. This tool would also work very well further upstream i.e. when identifying a new area of  interest.  At times it was difficult for the team to not jump into solution creation mode, and so we need  practice as an organization to build this muscle. The next time I would allow more time to review the  data (1 hour +) as some team members were totally new to the information and some technical data  was presented.

