Reflection - Mind Mapping

Challenge

I own a custom development software company in Mexico, and we often come across challenges that will be better solved with design thinking. This time I am talking about a project we made for a catalog selling company. These kinds of companies have a very peculiar business model. They produce some items (shoes in this case), design a catalog, and affiliate people so they sell the catalog items to their social circle. This customer of ours, needed to “update” their business model due to the COVID 19 pandemic, because their affiliates cannot longer visit their customers to sell the company products. We needed to digitize the company's service so their affiliates can sell during the pandemic (and attract a younger segment of affiliates with this new digital service).

Selection

The tool we used was mind mapping. Mind mapping is a way to externalize and structure our ideas in a graphic, understandable way for all the members of the team. For this challenge, we selected mind mapping because we need to deeply understand all the steps of the process that make this experience special for both the final customer and the affiliate. This way, we can detect “moment of truth” and pay special attention when designing the final solution.

Application

We started the process by having a couple of sessions with company's stakeholders. There, we document the main objectives the company have with this project; Allow the current affiliates to continue selling the products during the pandemic and attract a new segment of younger affiliates. Then, we created a mind map of the customer journey and selected what we thought were those “moments of truth”, the main points we have to be careful when digitizing the service. We thought there were two “moments of truth”; When the final customer selected the product in the catalog, and when the affiliate delivers the product to the customer.

Insight

With the mind mapping, we could deeply understand where those moments of truth are, and focus on designing something that can solve the problem better. With a mind mapping, we can not only draw a customer journey, but discover all the important actors around the experience and even the touchpoints where those happen. If we have used an analytical approach, we have never discovered where to enhance the experience we are digitizing.

Approach

For this particular challenge, I think the mind mapping was not enough. After we discover those “moments of truth”, we need to make direct observations or ethnographic interviews, so the team can deeply understand what happens there. Then, we could design a solution that not only preserves a great experience for the final customer, but for the affiliate as well. The reason I´m telling you this, is because we designed a good solution, but with many problems that could have been avoided.

