Have you hugged your product manager lately?

"When someone is compelled to come up and hug you at the Farmer's Market because you work on MindManager, you know there's something special about this product."

This is what Michael Deutch, MindManager's VP of Product Management, shared with me during my first week here at Corel, which acquired MindManager in August 2016.

Michael's an interesting guy. Besides being a yogi, a vegan and living by the beach, he's unlike many project managers in that he's not so focused in on product features that he forgets the real value that his product brings to people's day to day lives. And I suppose that's also why he's been working with MindManager for more than a decade. He truly loves this software and can't imagine managing his work, and life, without it.

So, here's my confession: I'd never heard of MindManager until I was recruited to join this (brilliant) marketing team. But now I am a total convert. Mapping is really therapeutic. I mean it … actually therapeutic.

Think about the last time you wrote a "to-do" list. For me, it's something I tend to do at the end of the day to help myself "close off." More recently, I've heard this described as "mental load" … that it's a burden on our brains when we carry around so many bits of information and tasks to remember. It's exhausting, and ultimately this kind of burden impacts our ability to be creative or even think strategically.

Here's an example of how mapping eases this burden by providing a single locale for all information — at both a high-level and a granular level. In this example, everyone on this project team knows that everything they need is right here in this one spot … no more hunting through email chains or intranet docs!

My colleagues in Germany like to refer to MindManager as the "swiss army knife" of business. Not only is it a great metaphor, but it's incredibly accurate because, as I've learned more recently, there is literally nothing — nothing! — that cannot be mapped. And who doesn't want a map to help them get where they're going?

Over the next little while, I'm looking forward to sharing some of the many applications for mind mapping here on this blog. And if you'd like to share yours, that would be even better!

Now go on … find a product manager in your company and give them a big ol' hug!

 

About the author: Julie Harrison joined Corel this past July as Senior Manager, MindManager Global Marketing. In her role, she'll be focusing on content and campaigns for regions worldwide, since MindManager is currently in use by millions of people in thousands of global companies. She can be reached at  julie [dot] harrison [at] corel [dot] com.  

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