You’ve grown your idea into a business with real customers, partners, employees and revenue — that’s a great thing. But you’ve plateaued and you’re not sure why. Or, you know why, but you don’t know how to overcome it. You need to “innovate.” But what does that mean? Consultants may talk to you about the panacea “design thinking,” but you don’t know what it is or how to use it in your tech company.

This is where we were in 2014. But by learning to use various innovation and design thinking tools, we discovered deep improvement opportunities that led to the transformation of both our product and our company. The is the first in a series of articles sharing what we learned and how you can apply it to your own organization.

The Joy Is In The Journey Mapping

In 2014, we were successful and growing but feeling stretched in supporting 70 partner organizations and 400-plus customers. As a company that provides energy savings by continuously monitoring facilities’ indoor environmental quality, we knew that what got us to that point wasn’t what would take us forward. Our growing pains weren’t clear, but they were real. To get the root of our pain, we used journey mapping, a collaborative method of learning how individuals interact with a company and its products, what they see as the pains and gains and how they define success. The ultimate goal of journey mapping is to produce an ah-ha moment — the tipping point when you go from “We think there’s a problem,” to “Ah-ha! This is our problem!”

To get started on your quest, begin by conducting several journey mapping sessions externally with customers and partners. Interviewees should be given markers and sticky notes, a few rules about openness and constructive feedback and then guided through building a picture on a whiteboard of their experience with your company. Participants should be encouraged to be critical as a conversation starter, not a conclusion. This is key to the success of the process. Another key is the exercise’s physical nature — using low-tech tools and moving back and forth from a table to a board facilitates collaboration. For most people, it’s a fun break from sitting behind a computer. Not everyone will get into the groove automatically, though, so the session must be designed to require it.

For Aircuity, this initial discovery work led to three observations:

• Each Aircuity team was good at supporting its part of the solution, but no team had more than a summary knowledge of the roles of other teams, partners and clients.

• Our partners (i.e., the outside representatives who sell our solution) knew how to deliver the solution, but each had their own methods and tools.