Reflection – Mind Mapping Tool

Challenge

I work in an IT reseller company, representing the biggest global software and hardware vendors in  the local market. Part of my role is to identify business opportunities and develop solutions where  the intellectual property of the company could be the main element in a recipe of products and  services to satisfy the customer needs. The intellectual property is relevant because it can generate  better gross margin than usual resell transactions.

Now a Days, during the covid-19 lockdown my team has a challenge to adapt quick solutions to fix  the new needs of our B2B customers. Usually my company works with traditional decisions process  which get priority to the low risk choices. But now we cannot work with that methodology because  it is too slow to catch the actual market opportunity. The IT solutions make possible business to  continue operate in the lockdown conditions and if we do not bring affordable and quick solutions  other competitors will do it.

Selection & Application

In these conditions we stop and reflect about how we can be as quick as possible. Design thinking  and agile methodologies are the answer. First, we must listen carefully our customers, we have to  find the new needs, we can’t guess their pain, we have to feel it and make empathy with them. Then  we start a marathon race with direct interviews with C-Levels specially with CIO’s. We make more  that seventy talks with a specific libretto, three questions to map the challenges of their business  and to organize the priorities. Also, we share ideas from other CIO that could make sense for their  business, in that way that conversation bring value and position our company as a partner that they  actually need.

I have found in this design thinking course many tools useful for these crisis period, but one of the  best instruments is to get empathy putting the customers problems in the center, rather than our  company solutions. I have heard that many, many times, in administration, marketing or sales  courses. But it is difficult to maintain that orientation, because always the selling team mindset want  the shortest way to the success. When we have reached the first twelve interviews, we start to  create a mind map with the collected information. Bring all the information and share with  coworkers in the company was a new challenge because the lockdown. But Map Mapping become  a good chance to improve our collaboration skills; we use backboard applications during  telepresence meetings and share ideas between the team to identify the opportunity gaps in the  new market.

That was amazing to find the often coincidence in the pain areas. Of course, was evident the  challenge to send people to work full from home represents for all of the companies. But we found  many other opportunities for new solutions in the new normal. The mind map was enriched every  day as more interviews we made. In parallel, the product and engineering teams started to generate  new solution ideas based in the connections between the issues mapped in the tool. In that way,

during the third week of interviews, we involve the proposal solutions in the conversations with  customers, that was a way to test the ideas, some customer advance to make some pilots with some  of our solutions, others plan to make that in next months. The mind mapping was a useful tool to  integrate the ideas between different teams with the same target, quickly find IT solutions for our  B2B market.

Insight & Approach

This period represents many challenges for the entire society. Specially companies that make  solutions aimed at increasing the productivity of other companies must change the methodology,  mindset, speed, and past structured ideas. Speed is survival, speed is to adapt to new conditions,  speed is the way to take advantage of the crisis and the way to increase the footprint in the market  when many other companies are afraid about their future. We have learned that in crisis the  companies must be close to their customers, and the mind mapping help us to quickly identify some  solutions that can become to improve the reaction of our customers in their markets.

The speed to propose, the freedom to create diverse solutions, to prototype, test it and launch,  made us different in the market. We get the trustworthy of CIO’s of the more important companies  in the market, that a great opportunity to grow next months. We have only two months after  lockdown rules in my country but now we are increasing revenue and we see a good panorama for  the rest of the year. The customer empathy and the learning mindset will be key factors and tools  like mind mapping, visualization and learning launch are now in our toolbox to bring more value to  our customers.

