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.

The full audio for the interview is here: https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/leanpub_podcasts/FM325-Rich-Allen-2025-10-23.mp3. The Frontmatter podcast is available on our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/leanpub, in Apple Podcasts here https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/frontmatter/id517117137, and almost everywhere else people listen to podcasts.