Empathy: How the Best Product Managers Achieve Customer-Centricity
Background
There is an endless supply of content extolling the benefits of being “customer centric” in your approach to product development or why product managers must obsess about their customers. Where I think a lot of the literature falls short is explaining what you need to do personally as a product manager to embrace what “customer-centricity” actually means. Simply doing more discovery or user research as prescribed by all the best practices out there will not automatically enable you as a product manager to have amazing insights as to how to best help your customers.
The key to really embracing customer centricity, and one of the most critical skills a product manager must master, is empathy. The strict definition is the the “action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another…” This is truly the key nuance - you just don’t know about them, you understand them. You don’t just know what they do, you understand why they do it. You can have a lot of customer interactions and never get to that level of understanding. Part of it is how and what you ask. The the final part is that you have to want to learn about your customers at this deep level. If you don’t have that desire and curiosity built in, if you’re not open to learning about them at that level, simply having more customer contact will not provide the same level of insights.
Ask yourself as you’re reading this, what do you know about the customer of the product you work on today? Do you know why they make the choices they make? What drives their sense of urgency? What drives them to act? What are their constraints? Can you look at a persona for one of your users and talk to it for 20 minutes to explain all of the reasons why these are the most important points or is your customer knowledge limited to what’s on the sheet?
Why is empathy so important?
It’s the Source of Innovation
As a product manager you are expected to know more about your target customers than pretty much anyone else in the company. Market research and product usage analytics are not a substitute for actual customer understanding. They help, they tell what people are doing, but not why they are doing them. The “why” only comes from a genuine desire to learn about, and care about, the problems other people have in their lives, and desire to help solve them. If you see talking to your customers as a “necessary evil” or a great way to “validate your ideas” you’re missing the point. The best product people invest in spending time with customers simply to understand, not because there is an immediate transactional benefit (e.g. they’ll tell me they like the idea).
At the highest level, empathy is at the root of true innovation, and moving past slight iterative improvements to what exists today. Sometimes this comes up in the context of “unarticulated needs.” Removing the buzzword shine, what this really means is solving for real or root problems that customers may not be consciously aware of, rather than the symptoms they see in front of them every day. You can certainly get all of the customer problems out on the table, but only if you set that broad understanding as the goal of your research.
Similarly, Clayton Christensen’s model of “Job’s to Be Done” very much gets at the heart of the importance in understanding the “why” behind customer decisions. Beyond understanding “why?,” this article shows how in many cases the customer's motivation can be a very personal and emotional reason. If you go into a customer interview only looking for soundbites to further justify an idea you already have, you won’t be open to hearing and understanding these customer emotions - in fact you may blow past it as it seems like a distraction to what you are after.
It Improves Your Decision Quality and Removes Biases
As a product manager you are making all types of decisions at various levels every day. Some are big and strategic, some are answering a question on slack from a developer on the acceptable load time for a table on page when viewed on a mobile device. At the end of the day as a product manager you’re being judged on whether your cumulative decisions led to the right outcome for the customer and the business. This may seem obvious, but it’s worth saying out loud. The better you understand what drives your customer’s behavior, not just what they do, but why, the better decisions you’ll make tactically guiding the team to come up with solutions. I’ll get into this more later, but knowing the exceptions, what’s not going to work for your user in certain cases, is equally important and is difficult to pick out from cursory research or metrics alone.
Continuously having interaction with customers also keeps you open to new information and avoids some common biases. Specifically anchoring bias, where you rely heavily on things you learned early on when judging something or someone, and confirmation bias, where you interpret information that fits into your existing beliefs, can get you too locked in to a particular path. I actually see this a lot in product teams that for whatever reason slowed down open-ended discovery. They think they know their customer well and that their needs are static and they reference soundbites from 4 year old (or older) research. You could spend all of your time and energy solving customer problems based on something that maybe was true long ago, or fits with your understanding from when you started at the company, but is not actually the case with the current customers. It’s not a guarantee, but getting out in front of customers often will make it much harder for you to go too far based on a biased picture.
It Will Make You a More Effective Leader
Empathy doesn’t only help you to be better at solving problems for your customers, it will help you be a more effective leader within the organization. Apply the same level of interest in understanding what drives and motivates the people you work with as you do with your customers. Even in companies with crystal clear strategies and amazing communication, people in different functions are going to have different personalities and slightly different goals. By understanding these nuances you will be able to better tune your message for the audience and help resolve conflicts by proposing solutions that achieve what you need and address the concerns of other groups. You’ll get more done and people will enjoy working with you, it just requires an investment in learning about your colleagues and building empathy for what’s required in their roles.
A Few Ideas to Improve Your Customer Empathy Level
Is empathy a thing you can improve? Yes and no. You can certainly put in the effort to improve how much information you take in and what you do with it. If you are indifferent to your customer’s plight, or neutral or even dispassionate about solving their problems then I think you will struggle to do well in this role. While not always a guaranteed marker, I’ve found that as a hiring manager people who enjoy “immersion traveling,” staying off the beaten path and out of cities, or living abroad for school or work tend to be wired to be naturally curious about the lives of other people. Customer empathy comes more naturally for them. For other people, they need to find a customer or problem they can relate to personally to find that spark. There’s a lot out there on how to improve empathy generically, which I’m not going to cover here. In this section, I’m going to talk about the parts that apply most specifically to empathy as applied to product management:
Find a Customer or Problem Space You Genuinely Care About
An easy first step is just asking yourself if you feel your customer’s problems are relatable. Are these problems something you’ve experienced yourself or maybe someone close to you that you care deeply about? If you don’t feel fired up to solve them in your current role, perhaps you should try going after a different customer segment in a different market. For me personally, I found small to medium business (SMB) customers to be the ones where I was just the most interested, regardless of the product category. I’ve known many small business owners, most are not particularly tech savvy and I’ve personally been their “IT support guy,” so making things easy for these users and giving them powerful tools is something I’ve experienced and care about.
Knowing what gets you excited is a good first step to setting yourself up for success as a product manager. For you it might be a different technology stack (the types of solutions that are possible), a particular vertical (e.g. healthcare), or some other angle. Spend time trying to figure out what you are passionate about and the odds that you genuinely care about solving customer problems will be much higher. Obviously switching jobs for this reason alone may not be possible or a good idea, but to the extent you can make changes that move you closer towards something you genuinely care about, you’ll be in a much better position.
Invest in Talking to Customers “Without Agenda”
There’s no way around this one. You have to make the time to talk to customers, a lot of them, all of the time. I’ve occasionally had product managers say something to the effect of “I’m too busy writing stories and turning the crank in engineering to do open-ended customer discovery.” I’d argue you may not know if you are working on the customer’s most urgent problem unless you are doing open-ended discovery. Even if' you’ve validated everything in your roadmap, you’re still potentially missing something. Maybe this seems obvious to say, but I see so many product teams across different companies assuming the volume of customer contact somehow automatically translates to high value understanding of their customers. It’s easy to spend a lot of time talking to customers about a narrow band of things that don’t improve your overall understanding of motivations.
Most importantly, you need to be doing this when you have no agenda other than learning. If you only talk to customers to do feature or UX mockup validation on something you’ve already decided to do, you’re leading the witness and cutting off deeper learning. In these situations you are locking the frame of the conversation to “how do you like this solution to a problem I’m assuming you care about?” Of course you still need to do validation sessions AND you need to do open-ended discovery to make sure you have time to understand what motivates your customer. What emotions drive their behavior in relation to your product? What are all the problems they face on a daily basis from most urgent to least? Where does the problem that your product addresses fall in that list? What is the relationship between urgency of problem and willingness to pay, frequency of use and long term retention and satisfaction? Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres is a great guide for helping to explore and document the full problem space and tying it all back to business objectives.
Embrace the Details
Attention to Detail is on my list of critical product manager skills for many reasons and customer understanding is certainly among them. You can get to an effective generalization from deep understanding of the details, but not the other way around. A persona is meant to be a marker that reminds you of the key elements and helps people on other teams get a little more exposure to customer details as their roles don’t afford as much customer contact. It’s simply not effective to try to communicate everything you know to everyone else on the team, so generalizations are needed and helpful. To use a really dated example, it’s like compressing an image file to send over a slow internet connection. You can send half of the information and people will get the basic outline just fine - they know the picture is of a bird on a beach and not a deer in a forest. As the product manager you should be the keeper of customer context and details - if you know as much about the customer as is available in the research summary artifacts, that’s a bad sign. As the product manager you need to have the high resolution original image of the “bird on the beach” in your head at all times to make the best decisions. Here’s a simple list of ideas to help you work on your improving your attention to details.
One of the biggest benefits of detail orientation that I’ve found is knowing in which situations the generalizations are likely not true for your customers. While generalizations are a helpful communication method, the danger is in believing they are true in all cases for all users. By embracing the details, and especially the exceptions, you can avoid some serious pitfalls when it comes time to develop a solution. Very often this comes again from understanding motivation, emotion, and the “why?” behind a customer’s actions. If you know what they’ve done historically that tells you one thing, if you know what drives them you’ll have a much better instinct about they may react to new situations whether that be a new feature or even something as mundane as scheduling downtime.
Summary
Empathy is one of the most important skills product managers need to be effective at developing solutions to customer problems and leading within an organization. It comes more naturally for some people, but in almost all cases it can be improved if you acknowledge the benefits and work at it.
