Mind Mapping

Challenge

I am doing MBA from a good college situated in not so developed city. Every semester, we are  asked to do a project to improve the local businesses. We are a group of five members which  changes in every semester. The normal project scope will be to give insights to businesses to  increase their sales. So the last project we did was for a hyper-local app company dealing in  food delivery. We had to help them with which customer segments they should target and how  they can convince the customers to use their service. They were the first movers in the local  market and haven’t been able to create an impact in first two months of working. We will focus  on trying to uncover insights with our team members and stakeholders (company and  customers) which will help the company.

Selection

During the initial days we had collected information which included data from the company and  similar companies in other cities. Also qualitative data has been collected. We felt mind  mapping is the best design thinking tool to uncover required insights from this collected  information.

Application

The first step was collecting data. Within 15 days, we collected lot of information including  quantitative and qualitative. The ethnographic interview of five different types of customers  was done. After collecting this data, we set up something like a small gallery and placed the  relevant information.

We invited people from all different customer segments we could think of. They were nearly 30  in number. They were divided into two batches of 15 each. So each batch was asked to visit the  gallery and was given sticky notes. They were asked to note down relevant information which  they felt were important in the sticky notes. After this, they were taken to the adjacent room  and were divided into 3 different groups of 5 members each.  Then, we asked them to cluster  the information they have collected.  Any volunteer in each group was asked to choose a theme  based on the clusters he/she has formed .Rest of the group contributed to the theme using  their clusters. Another theme was selected and the process continued. During each theme  ‘presentation’, relevant sticky notes of everyone were kept together on the wall. Both batches  completed the whole process.

Insight and Approach

Before using mind mapping, our team had formed lot of recommendations for the company  based on their assumptions. But the insights we got after doing mind mapping was entirely  different and some insights were the ones we discarded before the process had begun. Since

mind mapping brought together all stakeholders views and way of thinking, we were able to  deliver great insights regarding the customer segments to target and how to target them.

Next time, we would be collective more qualitative information. Also we would try to visualize  the information collected as this would be easier for people to understand. Now on, for any  project where the stakeholders are accessible ,I would be using mind mapping  tool.

