Mental Models

Young's method for building a large diagram of what people are trying to accomplish, drawn from transcripts of open ended interviews and grouped into towers of related tasks, thoughts and feelings. The finished model is aligned against what your organisation currently offers, which exposes gaps where people have a need with nothing supporting it and areas where you are investing in something nobody needs. The book covers recruiting, running the interviews, the analysis work of atomising and grouping transcripts, and using the diagram for strategy and prioritisation. It is unusually detailed about the analysis, which is the step most teams skip. Long, and worth the effort when a product spans many tasks and many roles.