On developing empathy for the customer

There is a very poignant takeaway in two electives that I’ve taken during my MBA: Design Thinking and Innovation Design. The former class is taught by a professor who invited practicing design consultants to share their practical insights, and the latter by a professor who has an industrial product design background. Both classes aim to solve the problem of product innovation, especially for larger corporations — and attempts to create a repeatable method / process. Both very different approaches highlight the importance of developing empathy for the customer. The operative word here is to develop, and that means empathy can be cultivated and can almost be considered to be an academic discipline.

The latter approach involves visual plotting of existing products from a specific technology, the supply chain (or value creation relationship map) of buyers, suppliers and other stakeholders, a few fictional user scenarios of the product and a business use case. The fiction part is important, because it encourages you to develop empathy, especially if you’re creating a consumer product. While it might not require much human psychological insight to know where to strategically place your call-to-action on a mobile website, this is much needed higher level thinking required if you consider how your consumer product is affecting and conditioning future cultural human behavior and emerging attitudes.

This class made me realize how much I’ve missed writing, and reading literature — or generally, people in my life who read prolifically, and can inspire others to do the same because these books offer new perspectives and ways of seeing and thinking about the world (and life).

If you’d like to see actual project work examples, please email me at Jacqueline [dot] gotomarket [at] gmail [dot] com.

Highlights

• Practicing design consultants have expressed that they now spend more time developing the problem statement for the customer prior to beginning work. The takeaway here is that the customer might not always have the best insight or idea on what their exact problem is. Because consultants are required to be solution-oriented, and the premise here is to identify the most relevant problem to be solved.
• Empathy for the customer requires a few other qualitative ingredients, namely, technical competence in self-awareness, ability to identify emotional nuance to get at root psychological and behavioral insights, communication, listening skills, and deft use of vocabulary to communicate the emotional value creation.

Relevant questions

• Are your customers good communicators? If you say yes, ask yourself again — are you sure?
• What does having empathy for the customer mean? Is it contingent on having specific skills and competencies? Does it require a certain level of emotional literacy and the capacity to succinctly describe the customer experience in an emotive way?
• Are your user stories (for product development) generating valuable behavioral insight about your customer? Does it require knowing the basics of good storytelling? Is it a critique of our current times because it’s topically and thematically relevant?

It is at least clear to me that good storytelling has exceptional ability to elicit certain strong emotions from its audience. The good storyteller or writer knows that emotion is the hidden subconscious force that drives action. You can call that intrinsic motivation. The character in the novel or film is merely a conduit to create emotional resonance. Does your product bring relief to a temporary problem? Is that the ideal emotive state you’d like your customer to have?

Instead of traveling, during times of necessary quarantine, there’s actually more time now to read and reflect (or watch great films on netflix and reflect). Personally, I think there are not enough reviews specifically catered to the effectiveness of different storytelling styles. Is the story character or concept-driven? Who is the narrator? Recently, after reading Seth’s post on Vacation in the time of Covid, I’ve decided to revisit a few choice quotes from the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life.

Quotes for inspiration (a substitute for vacations; attention — quotes could be contrarian)

“Happiness is good for the body,” Proust tells us, “but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.” These griefs put us through a form of mental gymnastics which we would have avoided in happier times. Indeed, if a genuine priority is the development of our mental capacities, the implication is that we would be better off being unhappy than content, better off pursuing tormented love affairs than reading Plato or Spinoza.

Not trying to be an advocate for tormented love affairs here, though we can reasonably argue here that if you’d like to develop strengths of the mind, the startup life could also be a way to go — not that it should be a source of grief or torment, yet it is definitely filled with challenges with extremely low probabilities of success. If an unexamined life is not worth living, then the unreflected startup life is not worth having?

What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability.

Good communication is very much a practiced skill. While this quote calls for accepting the necessary emotional attachment to one’s opinions and in expressing one’s authentic self, it is perhaps another way to approach authentic dissent during group discussions if you’re prone to requiring external harmony (at the cost of not exploring different perspectives and getting at the right problems).

Good listeners are no less rare or important than good communicators. Here, too, an unusual degree of confidence is the key — a capacity not to be thrown off course by, or buckle under the weight of, information that may deeply challenge certain settled assumptions. Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which others may for a time create in their minds; they’ve been there before and know that everything can eventually be set back in its place.

Unusual degree of confidence is the term I’d like to highlight because it is an extremely rare quality if you’re not a startup founder with a disuptive product— the startup /tech culture has certainly created the contrarian culture to challenge existing paradigms.

The problem with cliches is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Cliches are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface.

Conclusion: your user story should not be a cliche because your product isn’t a cliche.

If you’d like to inquire more about product consulting services or have read a great novel you’d like to share, please email me at Jacqueline [dot] gotomarket [at] gmail [dot] com.