Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge    I work for a management consulting firm serving a universal bank. Over the past decade, our  client has fought aggressively for market share, but has failed to make substantial gains. We  were presented with the challenge of developing a new product to engage the underbanked  population (not server by any of its direct competitors).    In addition to our own team, we set up a dedicated core team, and requested support from a  multidisciplinary group of experts (technology, marketing, legal, operations, etc.).     During initial discussions with the participants we were excited to find that everyone had ideas  on what product could serve the segment, but quickly realized that most of those were either  copy-cats of products existing in other markets, or otherwise too centered on the technology, vs.  the end-user’s need. We needed to step back and ideate from ‘what is’ for our target.    Selection    Mind mapping, as tool involves the development of a visual representation, akin to an art  gallery, were heterogeneous types of data are displayed so that participants can make  connections between them and distill valuable insights.    We selected mind mapping as a tool because it would an effective turn all our background  research and distill i) a common understanding of customer pain-points, ii) identify themes and  iii) facilitate the generation of product concepts we could later test.    Application    Prior to the mind mapping exercise, we conducted traditional research and gathered  demographic data and other statistics. With the core team, we also conducted interviews with  people in the segment and a few surveys (around the use of money and challenges people  faced during the last 30 days).    For the exercise, we printed the charts /statistics in large posters, and set them on a board as a  fact base. On a different board, we selected 4 of our in-depth interviewees and printed their  large photos along with their month-long journey (money in, money out). On a third board we  had interesting quotes from the interview /surveys printed in large font.    The exercise consisted of having everyone circle this 3 pane gallery and focus on identifying  pain points these segment had. They were to write down ideas as they came on post-its and  place them in a fourth panel. If they saw any other similar to theirs, they were asked to place it  next to it. One member of our team, stood by this wall and helped cluster post-its and keep the  process running smooth. By the end of the exercise we had over 140 notes, clustered around  20 “themes”.    Insight    The mind mapping exercise was instrumental in uncovering pain-points and themes that would  never come in traditional research (e.g. people like finding money they had forgot about). In  particular, I thought this tool was great in condensing different data types; people clustered hard

data – like how much people spent -, with softer concepts like ‘I am afraid of running into too  much debt’. It also helped people see beyond their preconceptions, all the element created the  mood of our target customer.    Going through this process together as a team, helped make everyone feel ownership of the  diagnosis, thus making the idea /concept generation phase simpler (e.g. everyone could back  their suggestions making reference to pain-points that the group, not the individual had  identified). We continue going back again and again to this board (which we turned into a digital  file) for inspiration and for validation of new ideas.    Lastly, an interesting note to add would be that this post-it exercise helped bring out ideas from  the more introverted participants.    Approach    As outlined above, this tool /approach provided a substantial improvement over traditional  research techniques; e.g. evaluating a laundry list of ideas vs. a set of pre-established criteria  and then validating with the participants.    In terms of improvements, we wished we had had the time to incorporate more of the non- traditional data type (e.g. video from the interviews) into the gallery. We also think we’ll get  better at the clustering part of the exercise over time.

