I had the opportunity recently to pose a few questions to Mike Jetter, the founder of Mindjet - makers of MindManager X5 which long-time readers know is one of my favorite applications for the Tablet PC (or any Windows PC truth be told).

Mike's story is compelling and well told in a book he authored with his wife Bettina, The Cancer Code. This inspirational two-person biography (he and Bettina tell the tale in alternating chapters) documents how Mike overcame a long battle with leukemia and developed the early versions of MindManager. From those early days in a hospital room in Germany, Mindjet has grown into a global company now headquartered in Larkspur, California with customers around the world.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Mike talked about how Mindjet has achieved their success and offers some excellent guiding principles for other software developers seeking to provide solutions for their customers.

Everyone at Mindjet uses MindManager. Our company wouldn't work without this tool. It's just as important as Office. We do web design, marketing planning, tech spec development, and agendas with the software. In fact, our Human Resources guide is a mind map.. We are our own best customer - this is how we learn how to make the product better. We do usability testing internally just by watching how we use it ourselves.

We used MindManager to write The Cancer Code. It was our primary tool for organizing facts, outlining the chapters, and getting everything in the right order.

Our experience and observations tell us that people really see the power of MindManager when they're involved in the mapping process, much more than when they are just receiving the finished product.

What does your research and customer feedback tell you about how MindManager contributes to better work?

Customer focus takes two forms at Mindjet: product development and making sure we are really addressing our customer's needs. I have seen so many examples where companies don't really answer the question being asked.

X5's new, more professional appearance was a direct result of customer requests. We heard from a number of customers that the earlier, more "organic' look the maps had in previous versions were an obstacle to get others to accept the maps as legitimate business presentation tool.

We have a group called "Customer for Life" internally focused on marketing, support, and education. The challenge isn't to reinvent the wheel. It's improving integration with other technologies and applications like Outlook. PowerPoint or Project.
 
While we always listen to customers, we don't always do what they ask. For example, we had a number of requests early on to use Word as the MindManager notes editor but we were convinced this was not the way to go. So we wrote our own editor that did precisely what it needed to and nothing more.

What are the benefits of the new architecture in MindManager X5?

We're committed to develop quality, supportable software with a future. In the case of XML, I don't think most users see the real benefits but we're working on tools to take advantage of the capabilities this provides. For example, XML provides enormous flexibility and growth in adding new import/export capabilities to the platform. We also believe that web services are definitely part of our future and XML is an ideal platform to develop this implementation.

We love to tell a story about a customer who's first reaction to all of the interface changes we made in X5 was "I hate it". Then a week later, he said,  "OK, I sort of see what you did". A couple of weeks after that he told us,  "I'll never go back".

We decided not make compromises - we wanted X5 to be the best it could be and knew there would be some short-term reactions we'd have to deal with. Old users complain and adjust, new users just get it. This tells us we got it right.

You've been very inventive in connecting MindManager to Microsoft Office productivity applications. You also had a Groove "tool" version of MindManager. How have these connections helped you grow the MindManager user base?

Groove was a good experience - we were their top tool download for more than a year but with their recent changes, we're currently not supported by Groove 3.0. We also made an early decision to support the Tablet PC platform. Tablets are the ideal platform for mind mapping. Maybe we were a little optimistic and ahead of the curve, but I believe that the Tablet features will become a standard part of how we work. From a business point of view, it was a better move than Groove. It's still part of the core product. In the next major release of MindManager, you'll be able to do ink in notes, outline view, and elsewhere in the application.

On the other hand, we made a very deliberate decision not to do Gantt charts in MindManager. We didn't want to blur the lines between MindManager and Project.  Our philosophy here at Mindjet is: Great simplicity, excellent extensibility.
 
We have almost 500,000 customers around the world. There are very different needs in different regions of the world and we have learned that MindManager is used in many different ways. So we have created a number of training programs that we offer to our customers and we also certify independent trainers in our software.

Training programs are not so much about MindManager's features - they're pretty easy to figure out. The training is more about applications and scenarios for using MindManager. Especially in a workgroup environment where a number of people need to work collaboratively. This is something that requires exploration and adaptation.

How active is your third-party developer program?

We are currently redesigning the partner program to encourage more third-party development. We need to do more work to make it easier and more attractive to develop on the MindManager platform. We're looking into even providing marketing support, perhaps reselling third party products.

Recently, Wiley published the MindManager for Dummies book which we are very happy about. Even some of Mindjet's new employees use it to learn the software.

What can you tell us about future plans for MindManager?

We're looking into better automation to make the process more intuitive and also making the underlying technology more robust and scalable. But we need to be very careful about not making MindManager too complex. It's a mature product and adding a lot of new features can be more of a problem than an opportunity.

Also, the upgrade to X5 was not an easy one and we need to slow things down a bit.  We added the ability to save back to the older MindManager 2002 format in our first Service Pack release. The bi-directional save capability forced us to make a number of tradeoffs. Originally we felt you lost too much information and did not ship X5 with this backward compatibility. But a lot of our customers couldn't upgrade everyone all at once and we felt we needed to respond to this concern by adding it in. It's a transitional tool.

It's been quite a wild ride. How would you sum up your experience in building Mindjet?

I never imagined MindManager could have this kind of impact. It really started about 5 years ago, when we acquired VC funding, and realized that we could turn this into a really big thing. I wanted to do something that would be useful for people, not just build a big company or make a lot of money.

It's a good feeling. I feel like we're connecting with people all over the world - that started almost immediately. It makes me sleep better. We've learned, for example, that people with dyslexia are getting great benefit from mind mapping with our software. We heard from a man in the UK with dyslexia who was finally able to get ahead in his career once he discovered mind mapping with MindManager as a way of expressing his ideas.