User Empathy for Product Teams
The job of a Product Manager is something most people are familiar with by now. The most important part of this is being an advocate for the customer. How can you really be an advocate for them, without the all-important trait of empathy. Empathy is what is usually described as “wear the other person’s shoes and walk a mile”. Or in this case, think like the users and do what they need to do with your product. This is important for PMs, but also matters for anyone working on the product team, be it designers, engineers, QAs and marketers. I learnt and realized the importance of this while working as an engineer building a SaaS product. Let me tell you the story of how I learnt this and some ways I realized I could build up our empathy.
Realizing the need
During my days working as a developer of a SaaS app, I realized the need for such empathy in my day-to-day work. Looking back, I had never really thought about this while I was coding. The product was in its nascent stages without a set PM function or process established. We as developers played a part in shaping up the flows and the user experience. So, a lack of proper empathy here was alarming and led to many places where users suffered. My main concern at the time was to build out code that solved the technical problem elegantly and using clever techniques. In the process, I would do things that made life easier for me as the developer. Re-use similar flows in different places, reuse code to make things look similar are some of the things I was guilty of.
Sometime after we released our product, I had to put in a shift helping our support team with solving customer issues. This is when I noticed a range of problems users had, due to our lack of empathy from their lens. One personal example really stuck with me. We had decided to build a form that was to be one of the most used parts of the product. It could be configured based on the users’ inputs. Every time we had tested this feature, we tried it with a few fields and were completely fine entering them every time. On call with a customer one day, I watched over screenshare as they struggled with the same form as their inputs had almost 50 fields. Any small mistake meant redoing the same thing all over again. This was the moment I realized how important it was to bring in a user empathy lens. It was more than possible to automatically read and configure the default entries for the fields and save time for users. This did not strike us as necessary since it was a hassle for us. We never really thought about users having to struggle with so many fields in their everyday work. Once we simplified this and remembered users’ default settings automatically, it made so many users fans of the product. It became a commonplace demo item to show how quickly users could complete frequent actions. Empathy for the user really helped make the product appeal to a lot more people.
Ways to Build Empathy
Empathy is an innate trait that we as humans usually have, to different extents. But, like any other skillset, it’s something we can hone and train to improve. If we are building for ourselves, we will probably have much more empathy naturally. For consumer products, such empathy can be built up much easily. For B2B products, when we are not exactly exposed to the business context, we will have to build this up. Building empathy for users can be done in some of these ways, especially for B2B products.
Use your own product — not for the sake of testing or familiarity but incorporate it into your organization’s day-to-day functions. You and your whole organization become actual users, and this is the best way for you to learn to empathize with your other users. Whatever difficulties you face, problems you see, you can be sure many of your customers will also find.
Become a user with complete setup — not all products can be incorporated into your organization. In this case, pretend to be your ideal target customer. Set up your environment and perform the actions that you might see them doing daily. This should not be with “lorem ipsum” dummy text. Simulate an actual sales process or marketing a product with a name you think up. Become the exact persona that you are targeting, except that the organization is fictional. Doing this exercise as a team will benefit all of you and help you really empathise with your actual users.
Talk to many customers — they would love to hear from the team that built the product. Nothing makes them feel more valued than a PM talking to them about what they want and how they are feeling. Keep the conversation open ended, try to understand how their day usually goes and what they feel like when working with your own and other products. Getting the full picture and context will really help you think better when you need to make those trade-offs and compromises when building.
Go on support calls or talk to support people — these conversations can help us understand and empathize with our users better. When users have problems or need help, they tend to explain their entire business context which will give you a complete picture of their problems. There is always a difference in the language they might use, based on their domain and mental model. But this understanding of their mental model and how your product fits into the jigsaw puzzle of their business is exactly what you will need to build your empathy.
Leverage new joiners and adjacent team members — watch them try things out to see how new users might feel. The main precondition here is that they are not already familiar with the product. Give them the basic context needed to operate like a new user, giving them a bunch of jobs to do with the product. Then watch them at every step, without intervening or offering any help. This would be a humbling experience, from what I have seen. This can really help us understand the struggles of a new user on our system. You could tailor the onboarding and training based on many such insights we get.
A caveat here would be to not get biased by certain users and their unique needs, so you will need to do multiple things among these, to avoid the possibility of such biases creeping in. Building up empathy will only supercharge the product team, bringing better products and delightful experiences for your users.