Empathy is one of the most prized ‘soft skills’ any manager can have. It contributes to better teamwork, better communication, and even better product creation. It may seem odd to assert that empathy is vital to creating a practical, successful product. However, being empathetic towards your customers and cultivating this skill in your team is enormously beneficial for any business.
It’s important to ensure that you understand what customer empathy means so that you can effectively implement tactics for cultivating it in your organization. Customer empathy is recognizing the unique circumstances and personhood of each individual using your product, and what might have caused them to seek it out initially. Understanding that each person is an individual with specific needs will allow you to create a product that better meets these requirements.
Cultivating Empathy
One of the most important parts of cultivating empathy is listening to other people. Many workplaces encourage managers to act as though they always have the answers or not to seek feedback personally, but when creating or improving a product, this can be a mistake. Even if you think that you know how your customers will use your product, the reality of everyday use is often drastically different than you could imagine or project. Many successful product managers find it helpful to directly interact with users either by visiting them physically to observe their needs or hear their suggestions or by spending some time personally working in the customer service department.
Before creating a product, it is conventional wisdom to engage in customer research so that you know who your product needs to work for and what it should do. However, just asking people questions about their priorities for your product can lead to gathering incorrect data. It’s more helpful to observe what systems they are using that your product could streamline and what problems they encounter in their everyday work. Try to ask open-ended questions, like how they define a successful year, and allow them space to completely answer the question without prompting or interrupting them. By gathering data this way, you can observe the problems your customers have yourself and identify possible solutions from there; your customers are not experts in product design, so asking them how to solve the problem is unlikely to help you. Listening to customers articulate their struggles and using your expertise to create solutions will help you create a product everyone is happy with.
It’s also essential to make sure that your team utilizes the same practices. Product designers will sometimes focus on things like an aesthetically pleasing design, overlooking things like usability and accessibility. Exposing your employees to actual users makes it easier for them to prioritize the things that will make your product a success.
Why Empathy Matters to Product Managers
The product manager is often the primary liaison between the customer and the team that is building a product. Having an empathetic product manager is essential to fostering the ideal conditions to create a product that customers will actually use. Product managers who have taken the time to understand their clients’ pain points and empathize with their frustrations will be able to communicate to their teams what should be adjusted to create the ideal product.
Many companies fall into the trap of not designing their products to create a satisfying customer experience, but only to make money. While businesses must generate revenue, this will be easier to accomplish if you create a product that’s focused on meeting the customer’s needs in the long term. This requires the combined efforts of a united team, which the product manager can facilitate. Being empathetic will make the internal process of communication between different stakeholders in the design process much smoother. It can help you intuit how much time and attention different members of the team may need, as well as effectively communicate to different groups, like your salespeople and executive, so that your company can achieve a united vision for their product.
Practicing Empathy
Since the process of gathering information from your customers to create and improve your products is constantly ongoing, it’s vital to continuously improve your empathic skills to deliver a better experience. One of the best ways you can practice being empathetic is by listening to your friends, coworkers and customers. Go out of your way to interact with people, and spend time listening to their needs and wants. If possible, spend time in the customer service department helping your users. Try writing the information you gather down, then reviewing and communicating it to others. This will help you process and understand what you observed more thoroughly.
In product management, it’s also important to quickly confirm any feedback you get was correct by returning to your customers and asking for more information directly after you implement changes. In business, it can sometimes take a long time for a complaint or problem to be communicated to the personnel with the expertise to fix it; a product manager interceding directly can shorten this process. It will also help you to better understand the client’s needs; if something went wrong during the improvement process, then talking to the customer again will let you determine how they make requests and how to interpret their feedback.
Being empathetic may not seem like an essential skill for a product manager to have at first, but upon further thought, it becomes clear that it’s one of the most crucial traits for a manager to possess in order to create a fantastic, essential product for customers.