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The thesis
The interpretation is the artefact. Everything else is a transcript.
Otter captures what was said. RICS captures what it meant.
The empathy map, drawn as a data model in four quadrants. Says, Does and Feels are each labelled as covered or not covered by existing tools. Thinks is the quadrant RICS is built around.
Says
COVERED — DOVETAIL, OTTER
The literal words. Every transcript tool has this.
Thinks
NOT COVERED — THIS IS RICS
The interpretation. What she meant behind what she said.
Does
COVERED — MAZE, GRANOLA IN PART
The observed behaviour, workarounds and all.
Feels
NOT COVERED — NO TOOL WE FOUND
The emotional layer. Rarely stored as structured data.
THE EMPATHY MAP, AS A DATA MODEL
Coverage assessed from publicly documented product features, August 2026. Named tools are competitors we respect; treat this as our reading, not theirs.
Why the Thinks column has been unclaimed white space.
The empathy map has been product craft for two decades. Every design school teaches it. We are not aware of a tool that ships it as structured, queryable, first-class data.
Dovetail's model centres on transcripts and tags — Says. Maze's centres on behaviour — Does. We have not found a tool that carves out Thinks as a separate column with its own author, confidence level, and evidence link.
Thinks feels like commentary. It is not. It is the moment a PM turns 'yes, this looks good' into 'she means only if the fees drop below 1.5%'. Without it, the transcript is inert.
The four dimensions, spelled out.
The four risks every insight answers to.
Every insight is filed under the decision it should change — will they buy it, can they use it, can we build it, does it work for the business.
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A QUESTION IT ANSWERS
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Designers query Feels and Does against Usability. Engineers query Says and Does against Feasibility. PMs query Says and Thinks against Viability and Value. Executives stress-test strategy against the trade-offs on record.
The intersection is where product decisions actually live.
Product risk
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16 cells. Every product decision lives in one of them. RICS queries all 16.
Structured at capture, not reconstructed months later.
The tagging pass runs on the recording, not on your memory of it. Says, Thinks, Does and Feels are fields in the artefact — not notes someone might write up later.
What the substrate outputs.
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