Reflection – A visualization Tool as a way to help employee team fully understand the  relationship network of product features and customer needs – the case of outdoor  activity web and mobile focused enterprise.

Challenge

The problem that was to be solved in our company (that forms internet & mobile products  dedicated to outdoor activity amateurs) was connected with incomplete comprehension by  our employees of internal relations among our products as well as their features’ ranges in  reference to customers segmentation. The company team had to face overabundance of the  information related to unclear structure in the mind of products’ features which were, on  one hand quite similar to each other, but on the other they based on different frameworks  (so couldn’t be easily combined into one organism) and were dedicated to at least two types  of customers: individuals and institutional ones, however much deeper segmentation was  present as well. Because of the historical reasons (employees had been shared into groups  before and worked only on chosen products) there was lack of a comprehensive knowledge  in the company team about which parts of our systems were the most valuable for which  customers and how to combine different elements of the products to fit the customers’  needs in the best way. Even if we had plenty of data about our customers and their  expectations, thanks to feedback we received, research we did using both ethnographic  techniques and analyzing quantitative data, there was still no wholistic view of the employee  team on all the connections among our different products, frameworks and features with  combing it with customer segmentation.

Selection

For me, a visualization has been always a natural way of presenting processes, strategies,  organization structures and ranges of responsibilities of team members as well as new ideas.  When speaking always a piece of paper or a flipchart with a marker pen had to be at hand. I  appreciated visual data presentations and visualization of goal projections when we used  customer development methodology to analyze our customers’ needs and re-organize our  projects. In design thinking process it is crucial for all the stages: starting with journey  mapping, value chain analysis, map mapping through testing & prototyping to learning  launch. That’s why to present in a simple and understandable way all the complicated  aspects of connections linking our products and taking under consideration our customers’  needs (using mind mapping methodology) we needed to… draw it!

Application

We gathered out teams’ managers, shared into groups, gave away pieces of paper and asked  all groups to draw the main products and their features on one side of the page and the  main groups of customers with their possible needs on the other. And then we asked them  to combine products, features and customers’ needs in a way they find all the relations  among these particular elements of the system. Soon we had a couple of presentations that

differed one from the other slightly or in a quite a visible way. We analyzed all the  differences and discussed them together. We used visualization tool again to research and  present each case. All this work became a good base for co-creating a common visualization  of the relationship network within the company system including a production zone  combined with customers’ expectations and values. Even slight differences among our  products were defined and marked in the visualization and a whole graph perfectly  portrayed the company system of internal connections, dependencies and relations.

Insight & Approach

This moment was a turning point in a process of a product strategy building in our company.  Since then the team was much more sure of the relations between particular features &  functionalities of our products with customers’ needs, they got to know more of the  customers segmentation itself and could define the main values that our products deliver.  Also a mind mapping visualization let them systematize the products ranges and their  common areas, as well as differences. It also let all the participants see the gaps in our  system and its weaknesses, which was useful as a starting point for  the next brainstorm  gathering, in which we faced the issue of projection of possible changes and searching for  new solutions (“What if stage”). At that phase of our research process the visualization tool  was also indispensable.

Tomasz Ostrowski

