Solve the right problem
Want to expand your product offerings, enter new markets, or just figure out why a product is not performing?
Let me help you map out the problem space ahead of you and focus on opportunity areas with the most impact.
Strategic impact
We can help your teams transform their intent into strategic impact. Here are a few ways in which teams use opportunity maps:
1. Gap Analysis
The difference between approaches and your orgs capabilities
2. Risk mitigation
Verify that solutions are aligned to people
3. Diversification
More closely align design possibilities to the nuances of the different thinking styles
4. Consolidation
Consolidate existing research into one overview
5. Consensus building
Clarify positioning and prioritization
6. Content strategy
Content mapping of a proposed solution
7. Untapped opportunities
Widen knowledge of the possibilities in the problem space
8. Stronger Metrics
Tune your metrics to how well you support a thinking style, per tower in the mental model diagram.
How we build opportunity maps
Each time we conduct a study, it includes 5 participants per behavioral audience segment, focused on a certain purpose. You can start small and aggregate over time. We begin the engagement with a discussion of the scope of research, to make sure we frame it in a non-solution-focused manner. Then we go conduct the research, giving you updates each Monday as work proceeds. We can give you transcripts of the listening sessions about halfway through, and then we deliver the mental model diagram and/or the behavioral audience segments, depending on what you’re after. We conclude with collaborative working sessions where we discuss insights, actions, and next steps with you and your stakeholders.

Find examples of the application of Opportunity Maps and Thinking Styles →
My Process
- Frame the Study
- begin with careful exploration of why you are seeking deeper understanding and what combination of thinking style + purpose you want to study (1-3 weeks)
- find and qualify candidates (2-3 weeks)
- Conduct Listening Sessions
- Approximately an hour with each participant (2 weeks)
- Optional field visits (when topic is physically habitual): add concepts that didn’t come up in listening session (+2 weeks)
- List Concepts & Summaries
- Comb and summarize transcripts, deeply understanding 100% of the Speaker’s concepts (3 weeks)
- Find Patterns
- Find affinities across participants by focus of mental attention; Keep bias out of the data by building from the bottom up (2 weeks)
- Find the Thinking Styles
- Personas-sans-demographics; write participant descriptions, compare unique concepts to form participants into groups, write descriptions for each thinking style (1-2 weeks)
- Generate the Mental Model Diagram
- Use one of the tools to generate the diagram from the data sheet created in step 4 (1 hour)
- Spend time considering what other data to layer on top of the model, such as thinking styles (1 week)
- Create the Opportunity map
- List a collection of org’s existing capabilities: products, support, services that your org produces (1-4 weeks)
- Align some of the org’s capabilities beneath the one tower it supports strongly (solid line border); Also align some of the capabilities beneath towers it kind of also supports (1-2 weeks
- Optional: also align capabilities from competition, or draw in dependencies between capabilities, or add future capabilities already planned
- Gap Analysis
- conduct a review of gaps & weaknesses beneath towers, deciding on priority or importance to the org (1 week)
- Opportunity Discussion
- map out and combine opportunity spaces; discuss prioritization; cross-pollinate with existing market segments, create opportunity studies (1-2 weeks)

Coaching appointments
You may not be ready for a full fledged coaching. But, if during your work there are questions that come up you can get in touch, by booking an appointment. These are working sessions, where I will help you find out stuff.
How can I help you?
Tell me about your problem, and I will get in touch as soon as I can.
