A practical, visual method for reconnecting your organisation to the people it’s meant to serve
“Most teams don’t suffer from a lack of effort — they suffer from a lack of alignment.”
User Needs Mapping is your blueprint to help teams make decisions based upon what is valuable, not just visible. Whether you’re leading a digital transformation, scaling an organisation, or simply trying to reduce internal friction, this book shows you how to expose the invisible forces that are holding your teams back — and what to do about them.
👥 Who’s it for?
- Leaders looking to create clarity, focus, and alignment
- Change agents and facilitators running workshops and transformations
- Product and platform teams seeking smoother flow and fewer handoffs
- Team Topologies practitioners looking for an outside-in approach to team design
- Anyone stuck in the maze of inside-out thinking
📚 What’s inside?
- 💡 A step-by-step guide to the User Needs Mapping technique
- 🔍 Real-world case study from a scaling company
- 🧠 Tools to identify misaligned team boundaries and dependency overload
- 🧭 Techniques to guide better team and service design decisions
- 🤝 Approaches for managing tension across teams and stakeholders
“Grounded, practical, and refreshingly visual — this book turns alignment from a buzzword into something you can actually do.”
👋 About the Author
Richard Allen is one of the longest-serving Team Topologies Valued Practitioners and has spent over two decades helping organisations reduce friction, evolve team boundaries, and align around what truly matters — faster flow of value to meet user needs.
🌟 What the experts say
“User Needs Mapping is a vital approach for any leader who wants to empower teams to be good stewards of meaningful outcomes…I am confident it will help you and your teams deliver value with less friction and more meaning.”
— Matthew Skelton, Co-author, Team Topologies
“If a Wardley Map gives you the landscape, UNM shows you what has been sitting at the end of your street all along.”
— Simon Wardley, Researcher, explorer of maps, recovering CEO
💬 What readers are saying
“User Needs Mapping transforms the way that teams communicate, collaborate and operate with a lean, informative and intuitive approach. This book provides teams with a blueprint for a streamlined, high-throughput operation, with inclusivity and understanding at its core. A must-read.”
— Sacha de Vaux Rice, Senior Backend Engineer, Founder, Consultant
“We’ve all felt the frustration—projects dragging on, teams spinning in circles. Rich cuts through the chaos with User Needs Mapping: a clear, intuitive model that puts the user where they belong—at the centre. This book is packed with tools to help you figure out what your users really want, so you can get organised, meet their needs, and deliver real value for your business. It’s smart, straightforward, and seriously useful.”
— Vicky Brentnall, Product Director
“Whenever I’m trying to solve a product problem, in the end the answer always comes by ignoring the product and thinking instead about our users. Rich’s book gives you a recipe for doing that across your whole organisation. It’s well-written, full of practical examples, and can be tailored to fit the needs and abilities of any team.”
— Debbie Kite, Product Lead
What are your thoughts? I’d love to hear them. Your feedback helps me learn, but it also helps others discover whether the book may be useful for them Get in touch. Or even better, leave me a quick review on Amazon!
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