Empathy and Product Management
Empathy is the most basic and fundamental skill that you can have for success as a product manager. Empathy in product management means being patient enough to listen and observe, humble enough to learn and change, and able to not only know what someone is dealing with but to feel and understand it with them. Without empathy, it is guaranteed you will miss out on insights about the best problem to solve and what to focus on; it is imperative that you understand your user in order to be able to deliver a great user experience and successful product.
According to the dictionary, empathy is typically defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” Don’t confuse empathy with sympathy. In contrast, sympathy is about feeling bad or guilty for someone else because of something that has happened to him or her. Empathizing with customers is truly about understanding their needs or problems.
Without taking an empathetic approach to product management and development, you’ll never be able to reach your full potential and really make great products that meet your customers’ needs. By taking an empathetic approach, you can also find out problems and faults in your product and turn a failing product into a massive hit!
Take, for example, the famous story of Airbnb. Recently, a customer reported that he was denied a stay at an Airbnb hotel because of the color of his skin. The company responded immediately with zero tolerance for racial discrimination policy. This policy states that no person will be discriminated against access to any commodity due to their religion, color, caste, national origin, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age. This promotes the empathetic nature of the company.
Empathy is necessary for product and feature negotiation. When talking to stakeholders, the developer team, and customers, understanding the other person’s motives will give you the best chance of arriving at a mutually beneficial decision. Empathy can also help you read into the answer to crucial answers from the developer team like how much time a given feature will take, what the most expensive components will probably be, or whether you should check up on a feature or if they’re already delivering as fast as they can.
It helps you understand how to deliver the right content to the right people. Deliver the right product to your customers. The right competitive talking points to your salespeople. Common questions and answers to the support team. The vision and roadmap to the executive team. Empathy pays off by helping you expect questions and needs of various stakeholders, and act in a way that maximizes group welfare.
So how do you practice empathy?
Listen
Get out, reach out, and get into conversations with others. As a product manager, observe and listen to users on at least a weekly basis (ideally, multiple times a week). Listen closely to how customers phrase their problems and their domain space. Use that language when talking with them. These descriptions and words can provide you with a way of discussing issues in a common language, and you can later use this language to describe your product and build out value propositions that really resonate with them.
This is best done through a combination of research techniques, including observation, conversational research, UI/UX testing, support conversations, and networking. Start talking to your team members, build rapport with users and the audience. Try to understand your user- their needs and wants, what they would like to change or what they’d like to add. Your product will be better for it.
Abandon your ego
For once, forget who you are, what you think is right for the user. Ask what they think is right for them instead of assuming it. Understand and experience the feelings of others. Put yourself in other people’s shoes and try to understand their point of view by putting aside our own preconceived beliefs and ideas. Understand their physical environment, needs and challenges they may be facing.
Turn insights into action
The best insights mean nothing if you don’t remember them and share them with others. A notebook or running document is a good starting point. In addition, you’ll find value in creating a regular processing habit. Set a timer and review your previous notes. Summarizing your notes is a powerful technique for creating meaningful insights out of lots of qualitative data.
Remember that having an insight is not the same as communicating and/or applying it. So, take notes while talking to customers, summarize the notes into actionable insights and work to deliver exactly what your customers want. Also, it’s always good to debrief after each interview. If you can, interview in pairs or as part of a team, so that one of you can keep direct eye contact with the person and others can take note of words and body language. Take notes and have a follow-up discussion to document what each of you heard.
Shorten feedback loops (aka, get back into more conversations)
Get user validation after every step. After a feature launch, best way to know the details of its working is by watching someone use it (use it yourself as well). Don’t assume you know about every change in the market, maybe since you last planned that feature, a better version of same is launched or people don’t even need it anymore — reach out and talk to people. Empathy grows when you can quickly learn and adjust. After your product has been in the hands of users for a while, loop them back in for another round of feedback interviews; this helps you sort out any new issues or bugs that may have come up.
Remember, let customers answer questions themselves. Don’t prompt them with suggested answers. Give them time to answer the question. Sometimes uncomfortable silence is good and will yield responses you might not have gotten otherwise.
Even though a product manager has many responsibilities for an organization, the biggest value you add is an understanding of the customer. Working with customers is uncertain and it can be handled by simply knowing and empathizing with your customers. Remember, empathy is like practicing an instrument, the more you practice it the better you get at it, and in this case, at incorporating empathetic methods in your workflow. Being able to understand what others are feeling is critical not just to building great products, but also to building great teams.
Empathy enables you to build products in a more human manner. Solving real problems for real people. It’s your superweapon and allows you to make an impact through your product.
