How to Make Empathy an Everyday Habit For Your Product Team
Our habits are powerful. Bad ones can hold us back while good ones can propel us forward. But changing our daily actions to create better habits is a lot easier said than done. It doesn’t happen overnight, or with the flip of a mental switch. Rather, it takes time, patience, and repetition.
As a member of the Design Transformation team at Cisco, I partner with incredible engineers and product managers to create the best possible product experience. Part of my job is to help teams empathize with their users to ensure they’re solving the right problems. Luckily, many of my partners are already acutely aware of their users’ needs. But when we’re heads down building products, it can be challenging to consistently put our users first.
In his best-selling book Atomic Habits, James Clear identifies the small changes we can make in our behaviors to make them habits. Below, I explore how we can apply Clear’s framework to make empathy a habit at both the team and organizational level, and why it’s so important that we do.
When it comes to product development, many organizations prioritize speed, quality, and focus — all important elements to run successful businesses. But this hyperfocus and rush to get great products to market overlooks arguably the most critical component: the user. Companies are so obsessed with constant output that they neglect meaningful outcomes at the expense of their users.
To create the best possible solutions, we have to understand the real problems we’re solving. And to understand the real problems to solve, we have to talk to — and empathize with — the people experiencing the problems. We have to understand our users better.
We could ask teams to change their pattern of behaviors to focus more on the user. I’ve been on teams that have implemented user panels so we could observe and learn, and joined in-depth discussions around user insights. I’ve also seen designers and product managers collect user insights in the form of stories so we can share them more easily. But these to-dos can feel like tack-ons to our everyday jobs when what we really want is for teams and organizations to employ empathy often enough that it becomes second nature.
In Atomic Habits, Clear recommends that to form habits, we have to identify simple changes we can make — and then focus on making them obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. He calls this the “habit loop” because changes that are reinforced by natural human tendencies are more likely to be repeated and more likely to become habits.
Let’s take a closer look at the four elements James Clear identifies in creating and solidifying habits with the end-goal being everyday empathy.
CUE: How can we make it obvious to use empathy consistently?
Clear believes that combining a new habit with an existing ritual makes it sticky. It’s easier to trigger new behaviors when they’re connected to the ones we know and expect.
Specificity is also key. If we’re seeking to change behaviors, we must be specific about what we’re changing, and when. Otherwise, it won’t be obvious to individuals or the team. For example, “Every first Thursday of the month — immediately after our team meeting — we’ll talk to users about an upcoming feature.” Clear suggests that it’s important to give your plan a time and a location to live in the world. That way, we can execute with intention.
So, at the beginning of a sprint, when we talk through our plan of action as we always do, why not add a discussion point about how we plan to empathize with users?
At the end of a sprint, when we reflect on our work, progress, and what we could have done better, why not also reflect on how we exercised the empathy muscle?
During our regular lunch-and-learn sessions, we could share insights around user needs. No solutions or plans are required, just recently discovered user insights in the form of stories with a hero, a compelling problem they’re facing, and thought-provoking questions at the end.
We don’t need to create a brand new process around empathy. Rather, our existing activities can serve as a cue to extend the conversation to user empathy.
CRAVING: How can we make practicing empathy more attractive and harder to resist?
People crave community and connection. While regularly empathizing with users may feel like a lot of personal effort, we can make it more attractive by sharing the responsibility — and accountability — with our teams.
People also crave progress they can see. Leaders can help bring concrete user insights to mainstream conversations by highlighting and repeatedly making user research artifacts like user insights, personas, and user stories a part of their messaging. Organizations can encourage empathy by sharing its impact on the business in public forums.
Last but not least, people also crave fun. And what could be better fun than a light competition with the right spirit? For example, a weekly quiz on user insights with a leaderboard across teams.
Sharing stories with a sense of community and a dash of fun works as a natural force in building empathy across the organization.
RESPONSE: How can we make it easy for teams to employ empathy?
We have to make it easy to bring empathy into the fold of our product design process. But rather than focusing on the finish line and ‘The Outcome,’ Clear recommends concentrating on the startline and coming up with simple, unavoidable tasks we can complete early — and regularly — throughout the process. Consistent repetition helps build confidence and habits faster.
So, what’s an easy way to encourage empathy upfront? In the beginning, we can schedule monthly/bi-weekly/weekly user interviews. We can be flexible about the specific agendas, deciding on discussion topics as we go. Or we can create templates for user interviews that seek to understand their motivations, frustrations, and pain points.
To ensure the whole team (not just the engineers and product managers) has a shared user understanding, we can have different teammates observe some of the user discovery exercises. There’s no heavy lifting required out of the observers — they’d just need to be present, actively observing the users, and later share their observations with the larger team. We can also create a well-indexed central repository of this content that will make it easier for people to learn from these insights and stories.
When the team begins talking to our end users and/or discussing their pain-points regularly, we’ll become more and more obsessed with finding solutions to their needs.
Offering teams resources that are easy to find and easy to use, we can make practicing empathy feels manageable.
REWARD: How can we make activities leading to empathy satisfying?
The simplest, most underutilized, and effective way to create a habit? Recognizing and rewarding a desired behavior. Positive reinforcement works, and it can come in many forms.
But too often, it’s hooked to a deferred outcome. It can be much more impactful if we find ways to incorporate immediate positive feedback or ways to show our teammates we recognize their efforts and contributions.
For example, we can make a poster of user quotes — crediting the observers who shared the valuable insights — and share these artifacts with the larger community on Webex Teams or Slack. Or we can have a competition between teams for “most insightful user quote” to encourage deeper, prolonged discussions — with the winner announced by leaders.
We can track the number of people who talk to end-users and create a mechanism to reward the most consistent people every sprint.
We can highlight stories from the field to show the impact our products have on our users’ lives. When users choose our products, it boosts our bottom line. At the end of the day, having a greater connection to — and understanding users — is valuable to the business. Engaging customer success stories hammer home the real-life value of our work, which is both satisfying and motivating.
Immediate recognition, highlighting the deeper business impact of better user understanding, encourages individuals to repeat it more often.
By exercising empathy at the individual, team, and organizational levels, we put value not just on users but on people at large. This, in turn, inspires trust between individuals, boosts morale for teams, and creates a culture of care throughout the organization — enhancing our lives both personally and professionally.
If you have more strategies or ideas to help make empathy a daily habit at work, I’d love to hear them. Please drop your thoughts in the comment section below!
