As I founded my R&D company, Datagotchi Labs, I decided to work on PMBoard again with the belief that new technologies should be created if and only if they provides users with value. However, startups are incentivized by people with money (investors and paying customers) because they need to be able to pay their employees. Therefore, most startups offer free apps/services to end users so they can turn them into the products to be sold to advertisers.

Instead, the needs and desires of all product stakeholders need to be understood and synthesized when creating and improving products. Therefore, my new approach is to visualize stakeholder UX research in the form of empathy maps and product visions as journey maps created from those empathy maps.

The empathy maps used means-ends hierarchies from cognitive work analysis that I learned in my government R&D days, which map high-level objectives to goals to achieve the objectives, to activities to achieve the goals, tasks to achieve the activities, and resources/constraints to achieve the tasks:

I have started on a widget to create journey maps that cite these empathy maps, but have not finished it yet, therefore it’s still in progress (no image available at this time).