Successful Companies Build Mind Maps, Not Cool Products

“Can you please Google this?”

“Let’s Uber there.”

In most countries where Google and Uber operate, these companies have now become synonymous with the act of searching and ride-sharing, respectively. There is hardly any confusion nowadays when someone uses the above statements while in a social setting.

There are similar examples, among other categories too. For example, these days, it is rare for someone to walk into a store with an open-ended question such as — “can you please show me few phones that are within a price range or have a specific color?”. In most cases, a customer directly says — I am looking for the latest iPhone. iPhones have become synonymous with a phone such that it is no longer a brand, but the actual device one uses to call and text.

All these observations raise an interesting question — why do some products become the de facto choice for a customer? Is it because they are the best product in their category? Not necessarily true. The products that earn the title of being the “de facto choice” successfully build an instantaneous map in the customer’s mind — directly from the problem to a solution via that product.

It is relatively easier to identify a problem than to find a solution. As humans, we’re excellent at identifying issues or improvement opportunities.

If each person starts logging every problem they face during the day, regardless of whether a solution exists in the market, I am confident one person can end up with a list of over 100 items. However, without this exercise, most issues won’t be identified as problems because our brain has already built a solution mapping for them.

For example, every time we need to research information on a new topic, we don’t think to evaluate which search engines exist in the market or the pros and cons of using one over the other. We directly use Google because this system has been mapped as the solution to search queries in our brains.

Almost all users think with a problem first mindset. The moment we encounter an issue, our brain immediately fires off an internal mapping checklist, and if a row exists, it immediately returns a solution without too much thought. When this happens a few more times, the solution appears almost instantaneous and we stop seeing that particular situation as a problem. Moving forward, we subconsciously jump to using the exact solution whenever the same problem arises.

Therefore, a company becomes widely successful when their product gets mapped as the solution to a problem within a user’s brain. After repeated use, it earns the title of a de facto solution provider. Moreover, unlocking this achievement for a sizeable set of customers makes it significantly more difficult for any competitor to break that instantaneous reaction and replace the already defined mapping.

Two factors can provide competitors with an opening to replace a mind map — either existing de facto company is weakened (like Uber’s historically poor public relations and corporate social responsibility deferring riders to Lyft), or the competitor redefines the problem and makes the prior solution mapping invalid (like Slack did for modern communication)

Finally, to build a mind map for a product, a company has to not only meet primary customer needs but, more importantly, they must also invest marketing towards helping customers to consciously realize the exact issue that is being solved by this product. If the problem both resonate with the customers, and the link between the problem, the product, and the solution is easily understood, then the success rate of the adoption of that product is much higher.

Ultimately, the company that can not only build a great product but can also clearly explain the problem to all their users has a remarkably higher chance of earning that de facto title.

Therefore, to any founder/marketer/product person, I highly recommend evaluating their product using this insight for greater stickiness and customer loyalty.

P.S. Ideas and thought-processes such as these are often used by Product Managers in their line of work. If you are interested in transitioning to a PM role, I recommend reading my article to learn more -