Who Are You Really Designing For?

Why teams rarely agree on their users (until they make them visible)

Most teams believe they already know who their users are. It’s one of the most common patterns I’ve seen across organisations of every shape and size. A team will say, confidently:

“We know our users. We work with them every day.”

But the moment we put those “known users” on a wall, certainty starts to dissolve and different perspectives surface:

• Two people disagree about who the primary user is

• Someone adds a user that no one else has heard of

• Someone else removes a user they believe doesn’t matter

• A hidden internal user surfaces that quietly shapes half the team’s decisions

• A team realises they’ve been optimising for stakeholders, not users

• Entire user groups appear that have never been acknowledged before

You can feel the room shift. Not because the team suddenly became confused, but because assumptions they had been carrying for months (or years) finally became visible. This is the first moment of genuine clarity: the point at which assumptions become visible and the real work of alignment can begin.

The Illusion of Alignment

Teams often fall into a kind of false consensus. Everyone uses the same labels; “customer”, “operations”, “compliance”, “partners,” and because the words are shared, people assume the mental models behind those words are shared too. But they rarely are.

Ask a team to identify their users and you’ll quickly discover that:

• some people are thinking of external end-users

• others are thinking of internal colleagues

• some focus on individuals

• others think in departments

• some include upstream actors

• others only include downstream consumers

Without making these assumptions explicit, teams end up talking past each other while believing they’re aligned.

When we talk about "users" in the context of User Needs Mapping we're not referring to job titles, demographic personas, market segments, or internal functions. We’re talking about something far more fundamental and operationally meaningful:

• Who depends on you to make progress?

• Who suffers when you fail to deliver?

• Who experiences friction when your work slows down or goes wrong?

Those people — internal or external — are your real users.

Why Identifying Users Matters So Much

Defining purpose (Step 1 of the User Needs Mapping process) gives you direction, while identifying users (Step 2) tells you who that direction serves. Purpose without users becomes abstract- a neatly worded statement that has little grounding in the world it needs to influence.

If you misidentify your users or cling to assumptions, the rest of the mapping process becomes misaligned:

• Needs are misidentified because they’re tied to fictional or oversimplified users.

• Capabilities are mapped against demand that doesn’t actually exist.

• Teams shape their boundaries around convenience rather than genuine user value.

• Dependencies emerge not from necessity but from organisational mythology.

• Priorities drift toward stakeholder wants instead of user progress.

Teams don’t just misjudge what’s important, they make the right decisions for the wrong people- and that is where misalignment truly begins.

What You Discover When You Map Users Properly

Here are the common surprises that emerge when teams complete Step 2:

1. Internal users were invisible until now

Teams often assume that internal colleagues “don’t count,” but the flow of value inside the organisation relies heavily on internal users. Their needs often determine whether external users ultimately succeed.

2. Power ≠ User

Stakeholders frequently influence decisions, but they are not the people trying to make progress through your systems. Executives, committees, governance groups, and PMOs often fall into this category. Their wants are often mistaken for user needs, and misclassifying them leads to skewed prioritisation.

3. Users exist upstream and downstream

Teams often miss people who rely on outputs indirectly; data consumers, compliance teams, integrations partners, other product lines. These are the silent users shaping your flow.

4. Some people you call ‘users’ are actually beneficiaries

This is a subtle but important distinction: a beneficiary gains value from your work, but doesn’t interact with your product or capability directly. Understanding this distinction prevents confusion between value and need.

These discoveries aren’t signs of dysfunction — they are signs that the team is finally seeing reality clearly.

A Simple Way to Get Step 2 Right

A lightweight, focused exercise is often enough to expose the diversity of mental models.

Ask each team member to answer three questions individually on separate sticky notes:

1. Who would struggle to make progress if our team disappeared tomorrow?

2. Who experiences friction when our work slows down or goes wrong?

3. Who relies on us — directly or indirectly — to achieve outcomes in their world?

Once the answers are on the wall, cluster them into meaningful groups and name those groups based on what the users are trying to achieve, not what they’re called in organisational charts.

Then ask:

“Who else?”

This simple prompt often unlocks the most valuable insights of the entire exercise.

Compare the results across the team; misalignments will reveal themselves almost immediately. This exercise alone can be the difference between spending months optimising for the wrong people or aligning around the users who genuinely matter

Why This Step Generates Real Momentum

Starting with a clear picture of your users introduces momentum because it creates a shared understanding of reality — something teams often assume they have but rarely validate. When a team uncovers its different mental models, it opens the door to more honest conversations about purpose, priorities, and the constraints shaping user behaviour. Suddenly, ambiguous disagreements gain clarity: people realise they were optimising for different users all along.

This clarity also helps teams articulate the real sources of internal friction. Many “alignment problems” are not interpersonal or political; they stem from teams silently working from incompatible assumptions about who they serve. Once these assumptions are made visible, the team gains a renewed confidence in its ability to reason together. Decisions become easier because they are rooted in a shared understanding of user progress, not individual preference or organisational inertia.

Momentum emerges because the team finally has something stable and tangible to orient around; something more enduring than roles, structures, or shifting priorities. With this alignment in place, the subsequent steps — discovering needs, mapping capabilities, defining boundaries, and making flow decisions — become far easier and more grounded.

Closing Reflection

Almost every team that completes Step 2 of the User Needs Mapping process says some variation of:

“I can’t believe we’ve never done this before.”

The reality is that teams rarely pause to question what they believe they already understand. Step 2 creates that pause and grounds the rest of the User Needs Mapping process in shared reality rather than assumption.

If your team is struggling with misalignment, recurring friction, or competing priorities, start by clarifying who your users actually are. The insights you uncover may change the direction of your thinking entirely.

If this resonated and you’d like to explore the full process in more depth, I cover the complete User Needs Mapping approach — including examples, techniques, and practical guidance — in my book User Needs Mapping: Aligning Teams Around What Matters. It’s designed to help teams put these ideas into practice immediately. Visit www.userneedsmapping.com/book