The Leanpub Podcast 🎙️ Feat. Rich Allen, Author of User Needs Mapping: Aligning Teams Around What Matters
Rich argues that many teams fail not because they don’t try hard, but because they lack clarity on whose needs they’re serving and how their work delivers value.
Episode Details
In this Leanpub Podcast episode, host Len Epp interviews Rich Allen, author of User Needs Mapping: Aligning Teams Around What Matters, and an independent consultant specialising in socio-technical architecture and team design.
With over two decades of experience and a role as a long-serving valued practitioner of the Team Topologies community, Rich brings both hands-on technical depth and organisational insight.
Rich argues that many teams fail not because they don’t try hard, but because they lack clarity on whose needs they’re serving and how their work delivers value. He guides listeners through the essentials of the User Needs Mapping technique: starting with “Who are our users?”, then “What do they need?”, mapping the capabilities and dependencies that fulfil those needs, and finally, aligning team boundaries and responsibilities to deliver that value effectively.
For listeners involved in transformation, product, engineering or team design work, Rich’s insights offer a tangible framework to reduce cognitive load, increase alignment and re-focus effort to what matters most..
This interview was recorded on October 23, 2025.
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About the Book
Most teams don’t suffer from a lack of effort — they suffer from a lack of alignment. Misaligned goals, unclear boundaries, and a focus on internal priorities over real user needs leads to frustration, delays, and wasted potential.
User Needs Mapping offers a practical, visual method for reconnecting your organisation to the people it’s meant to serve. Whether you're leading a digital transformation, evolving your team structures, or simply trying to reduce friction and focus on what matters most, this book gives you the tools to:
* Expose hidden dependencies and misaligned responsibilities
* Identify and articulate genuine user needs—internal or external
* Make better decisions about team design, capabilities, and services
* Navigate tension between competing wants, needs, and feasibility
* Create clarity and purpose for everyone involved
Through real case studies and straightforward guidance, User Needs Mapping shows facilitators, leaders, and change agents how to put these ideas into practice. You’ll learn how to make alignment visible, turn complexity into clarity, and enable teams to deliver meaningful outcomes.
About the Author
Rich Allen is an independent consultant and sociotechnical architect with over two decades of experience helping organizations improve delivery flow, system clarity, and team effectiveness.
His career spans roles from software engineer and tech lead through to architect and start-up CTO, giving him a rare blend of technical depth and organizational insight.
As one of the longest-serving Team Topologies Valued Practitioners (TTVPs), Rich has helped numerous organizations adopt Team Topologies patterns, principles, and practices; reducing cognitive load, clarifying service boundaries, and enabling faster, healthier flow of value and learning.
Rich has also played an active role in the evolution of Team Topologies practices, working in the core team alongside the authors to shape modern thinking around fast flow and team interactions. He is the author of User Needs Mapping and the creator/curator of the Fast Flow Toolkit, Flow Decision Records — tools for designing flow-centric teams and systems.
Rich specialises in uncovering bottlenecks, supporting dynamic team evolution, and enabling sustainable ways of working grounded in feedback, autonomy, and continuous improvement.
In his free time, Rich enjoys spending time with family on the beach in Bournemouth and playing badminton when he gets a break from being a taxi for his kids. Rich also holds a third-degree blackbelt and teaching qualification in the Natural Way Karate (Shizenryu).
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Leanpub Book LAUNCH 🚀 User Needs Mapping: Aligning Teams Around What Matters by Rich Allen
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