
Clear the fog, see the landscape
Make products that are more resilient in the long run, because people will return to solutions that respect them. The result is a more trusting, respectful relationship with the people your organization supports, and significantly less harm to everyone.
Indi’s Problem Space Method

- 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)
- 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)
- Transcripts Into Concepts
- Comb and summarize transcripts, deeply understanding 100% of the Speaker’s concepts (3 weeks)
- Cultivate Patterns
- Find affinities across participants by focus of mental attention
- Keep bias out of the data by building from the bottom up (2 weeks)
- 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)
- Map 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)
- 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 (1 intense day)
- Add other knowledge to these priority areas, such as existing quant data, past solution evaluation, competitive landscape, etc., to create opportunity studies (2 weeks)
- Measure Progress
- For a priority subsection of the opportunity map (usually 5-6 towers), measure current support in relation to the towers and the thinking styles and the lenses represented (1 week)
- Define the help (weak or strong) or harm (mild, serious, severe, systemic) levels of each existing solution (that same week)
- Track improvement of support (existing improved solutions and new solutions) each quarter or year; give product owners and strategists something concrete to look at (over the years)
- Add more knowledge to the mental model diagram, to the thinking styles, to the aligned solutions, to the gaps (and re-prioritize as items are taken care of) and to the measurements as the years unfold

