Using Mind Mapping Tool

By Vito Ivanov

May 2021

Challenge     I am the senior product manager of a mid-sized software company. We have a  business line in which we provide bulk messaging services to the market. It's  now a few years that this market is almost commoditized and all the  competition is mainly a price war. I have recently read the book "Reinventing  your Business Model" by Mark W. Johnson and I found many insights about  having an innovative business model in it.  So I asked my colleagues in the bulk messaging business unit to join me in an  endeavor to find a new way of offering value propositions to our customers  and differentiating our service from the competition.        Selection     Since I was familiar with design thinking methods and tools, I decided to use  the mind mapping tool for organizing the current state of our customer needs.  I like this tool because it assists a group of people to unite their diverse views  on the customer problems and attain a shared view about the current situation  of customers' needs. We have a team of about 20 colleagues in this business  unit and they have a good knowledge of what the customers need and what  job they want to get done.     Application     I invited most of our colleagues in different functions (marketing, sales,  operations, CRM, development) of the business to participate in the activity.  Based on what Mark Johnson proposes in his book, I asked every one to focus  on the "Job to be done" of the customers. First I made a presentation out of  the chapter 6 of the book "Designing for Growth" which is about mind  mapping tool and presented it to the team so that they became familiar with  the activity we were going to start.

I provided sticky notes in different colors and pens for the participants and  asked them to write down their perception of the job to be done of the  customers they know.   Then I gathered the notes and tried to delve into the real and deep needs of  the customers by asking every person "Five Whys" questions about what they  wrote on the notes. Therefore, after finishing this step I had a comprehensive  list of the needs of the customers written on the white board. This was what  we could rely on as the input to the What If phase.   We extracted the design criteria using this list and we were ready to start the  next step.     Insight & Approach     By using the mind mapping tool, we succeeded to attain a good picture of our  customers and their most important needs. My colleagues in different  functions had some implicit knowledge of the customer needs that through  this activity became explicit and shared among the team.   Now, we were ready to start brainstorming the solutions for those problems.  Moreover, my colleagues became familiar and so interested in using mind  mapping tool for their other activities in order to make a shared mindset on  their team issues.   In the next phases, we saw that how important is having a well-classified and  well-shared list of customer problems for finding a proper solution and a  robust value proposition.

