Maximum Customer Empathy
Numerous articles have been written about Product Managers having empathy for their customers. This is extremely important for creating amazing products. However, I think many of this topic's writings commonly miss the point. Let me explain.
Customer empathy is something that I have grown into organically as I have worked to build products, services, and companies over the years. It wasn’t called empathy then, it was just ‘understanding your customer’. There are lots of techniques and principles involved and it’s all very complex and cerebral. All of this work is important and fundamental, however, there is one thing that nearly everyone, at the maximum misses, and the minimum doesn’t amplify enough — and ultimately the thing that will make you the most successful:
You have to be your customer. It’s not a soft skill. It’s to actually be them.
So for example — if your product is a SaaS platform that provides a framework to run Python jobs, and you aren’t writing Python code alongside your customer then you aren’t your customer — full stop. Yes, you, the product manager must be writing Python code using the very thing you built exercising the tooling, APIs, interfaces, and workflows you expect your customer to use. No, you can’t outsource this. It’s got to be you.
This isn’t to say if you aren’t coding you can’t be an effective Product Manager for this hypothetical SaaS product. It should simply mean that your career development roadmap is to learn Python to deeply empathize with your customer. To understand what is clean and handy with your product, what excites them, and most importantly what pisses them off.
This philosophy scales to any product you might create — if you are a CNC milling machine builder, then you should be milling parts, tinkering with work holding, and tooling. If you manufacture heavy farm equipment then you better be staying up late during harvest figuring out optimal lighting patterns — or whatever it might mean for your product.
You might say, well, then I have two careers and have to be an expert in both. One is the Product Manager and one is the customer. Yep, correct. Deal with it. Want to delight them, be them.
Now, if I am being honest, being the customer is not as hard as it sounds once you start to become them. This is because as you get better at being them, the direction, decisions, and community start to become obvious and clear. You are so deep in the arena you couldn’t make a crappy product if you tried. Once this happens things become pretty clear pretty fast. It just may take a long while to become them. No, it doesn’t start easy, it starts pretty hard, but over time as you become them, it comes to you naturally.
I am not going to sit here and say I have maximum empathy-I don’t. But I strive every day to be better, it’s my north star. I’m not as good of a DBA or Software Engineer as my customer, I am not pressed with the same scale or deadlines, and legacy code. But, I am writing the code, using the tooling and APIs, breaking the product, and being pissed off right alongside them.
This is maximum customer empathy — a journey, not a destination. The quest to be your customer.
