The Business Case for Empathy

Published in

Bootkik

7 min readSep 2, 2018

It’s 2018, and we have never had greater access to information than we currently do. We have all of recorded human history sitting in our pockets, and at any moment we are armed with the ability to know, in detail, more about a subject of our choosing than those who had dedicated their lives to it only a few decades ago.

Yet, despite the massive advancements we’ve made in the ‘knowledge’ field, I’d contend that we seem to be receding in our ability to empathize, or put ourselves in the shoes of others, and try to feel what they’re feeling. This deficiency has far reaching consequences that stretches into our relationships, politics, and yes, even our businesses.

Entrepreneurs that succeed over the next decade will be the ones that excel at understanding and identifying with their customers — generating insight into their unique barriers, pain points, fears, and the life they’re desiring to live (if only they didn’t have to deal with those damn barriers and pain points).

Empathy-driven design is an emerging discipline among Silicon Valley-based startups and tech companies, but you don’t need to be designing the next big software product to benefit from better understanding your customers. Here’s how any business can benefit from baking empathy into their product or service offering.

How Your Business Benefits From Empathy

It’s a classic scene on Dragon’s Den. A well-meaning entrepreneur pitches a horrendous product. Usually it stems from a personal problem they uniquely faced, but sometimes the rationale is no stronger than the phrase “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”. After a fumbling pitch, the camera cuts to the Dragons, mouth agape, trying to wrap their head around who in their right mind would build such an atrocious contraption. Finally, someone mercifully speaks up and asks, “So, how much money have you put into this?”

Usually, the answer is somewhere between “my life savings” and “I had to take out a second mortgage”. Cue more jaw drops.

The problem (for everyone except the viewers of these squeamishly memorable scenes) is that new innovations are usually paved on the back of a hunch, and in some cases those hunches can be incredibly wrong. After all, you won’t know whether you have the next iPad, or Palm Pilot, until you launch, right?

Empathy-driven design does away with hunches and giant bets (albeit, not entirely). Instead of spending years in a basement coding away at something you hope will “disrupt an industry” based on your gut instinct, or hundreds of thousands of dollars on opening up a restaurant based on a “cool idea”, empathy-driven businesses build their products and services around their customers real (note: not perceived) needs.

Co-Designing With Your Customers

The key element in empathetic product design is the emphasis on talking to your customers. The misguided Dragon’s Den entrepreneur’s downfall is that he spent all his time in his own shoes, solving a problem he had, without attempting to understand if that problem extended to anybody else. As a result, he walks away thinking “since I built it, they will come”.

Sometimes, businesses like his get lucky. Most times they don’t.

Empathetic entrepreneurs take the opposite approach.

Instead of making hunches, they bring customers into the development process — getting feedback along the way, as they refine and build their product or service offering.

As a result, these businesses, once they launch, are inherently less risky. As an entrepreneur, you’re not going out on as much of a limb as some of your counterparts. Instead of pushing a product on the market, you’ve let the market pull you in a direction. The work of convincing your earliest customers you solve an important problem of theirs is already done — they’re the ones that told you there was a problem in the first place!

Secondly, once your product or service is developed, you don’t need to start from scratch looking for early adopters — you’ve likely been talking to them already for months! The people that have helped you refine your product or service offering are prime candidates to give you feedback on if your business is so valuable they would pay for it.

How to Develop Customer-Empathy

As startup expert Steve Blank says, the key to startup success is to get out of the building. Building customer empathy begins with one thing: deeply understanding who your customer is.

More than that, customer empathy means feeling your customer’s pain, and identifying their motivations. What are they trying to accomplish? What are they scared of? What’s getting in the way?

Here’s a few practical ways you can begin to develop empathy for users or potential customers:

Acknowledge Your Assumptions

In order to put yourself in the shoes of your users, you first need to take off yours. Like our friend on Dragon’s Den, we all have a tendency to assume that the way we see the world is the way others see it as well.

Building a business that serves the needs of others means addressing them where they’re at, and acknowledging that they can probably lead you to a solution to their problems better than you can. The best way to do this is to put aside your assumptions about what they need, by addressing your biases.

If you are walking into this process with a handful of ideas on how to make life better for your customers, that’s okay. But write these down and put them aside for the time being, you don’t want them influencing your interactions with potential customers.

Examples:

“I am assuming customers would be willing to pay 20% more for a high-end haircut/grooming experience”
“I am assuming there is a market for Indian cuisine in my neighbourhood”
“I am assuming a website connecting non-profits with volunteers would be helpful for both parties”

Observe and Report

Once you’ve acknowledged and (temporarily) shelved your assumptions, you need to begin gaining insight into your customers’ behaviours and motivations. As described in the book Well-Designed, your goal during this process is to understand and empathize with your customers, chronicling their behaviours and feelings as they interact with the problem you’re trying to solve.

This requires you to physically be where they are, and report what you’re observing (I recommend you get their permission first, otherwise you’ll likely have them reporting on you as well, to the cops.) If possible, ask them to describe what they’re doing, and what’s going through their head while they’re doing it. The better insight you have into why they do the things you do, the better you’ll be able to target a solution that solves not their surface-level symptoms, but the root cause of their problems.

Examples:

Joining a middle-aged man for a trip to the gym, observing his routine, and what his fitness goals and motivations are
Sitting beside an accountant as she processes expense reports, observing the frustration on her face as she deals with improperly-filed claims
Spending an afternoon with a single-dad as he tries to entertain his elementary school-aged kids on a Saturday on a budget

Toyota’s “The 5 Whys”

Of course, the best way to understand what truly motivates your customers is to ask them. Unfortunately, it’s human nature to not necessarily be forthcoming about our deepest fears and motivations to complete strangers. To understand what truly fuels your users, you need to be able to separate symptoms from underlying illnesses, the behaviour from the root cause. One of the best ways to do this, according to product design expert Nir Eyal, is to embrace your inner toddler and keep asking “why”. As Taiichi Ohno, the father of Lean Manufacturing at Toyota described, “by repeating ‘why?’ five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear”.

Sometimes you may be able to explicitly ask someone this, but it’s more likely that you’ll have to put yourself in their shoes and extrapolate a little bit. For the sake of making this activity easier, I’ll offer myself up as an example:

Travis is writing a blog post on Developing Empathy.
Why?
He hopes this article will help entrepreneurs/product managers create better businesses.
Why (would he want to do that?)
Because then Travis will have played a role in helping people.
Why (is that important?)
Because then he will have made a tangible impact in people’s lives/career.
Why (does that matter?)
Because he wants to make sure he doesn’t die without making a difference somehow.
Why (not?)
Because Travis is scared of leading a life that feels insignificant/unaccomplished.

Whoof, wow that got heavy fast, hey? Yet if you were building a better blogging product targeted towards me, what features would you emphasize? Probably not the ability to embed Spotify songs, or have funky font colours. Those may address that very top layer, providing a better blogging experience, but it doesn’t speak to my deepest fears or motivations. However, build a blogging product that connects me easily with readers looking for business advice, and now I’m interested. You’ve focused not on the symptom, but the root problem I am trying to address. Ask yourself the same questions about the middle-aged man at the gym, or the volunteer looking for non-profits that need an extra set of hands, and you’re well on your way to empathizing deeply with your customers, and building a product that truly meets their needs.

A Lifelong Journey

What is the limit to how fast a human will ever run the 100m dash? Theoretically, it’s 0:00001s, but we all know that’s not possible.

Instead, thousands of athletes around the globe dedicate their lives to shaving milliseconds off their personal best — not trying to reach perfection, but instead trying be better than they were yesterday.

The journey to acquire more empathy, and better put yourself in the shoes of other people, is similar. There is no pass/fail; instead, it’s a process of conscious decisions to get closer to your goal, knowing that you’ll never reach perfection.

The benefits to an empathetic view of others extends far beyond business, but fighting to genuinely understand the struggles/frustrations of your customers can lead to fascinating insights and unlock new opportunities to solve real problems and provide value for people.

How would an empathetic view of your customer or users affect your product or service? What insights do “The 5 Whys” trigger in what motivates your customer? Let me know in the comment section below!