Empathy is not a soft skill. It’s a superpower.
Understanding your users and their needs is not a ‘nice to have’. It’s a strategic imperative in software design.
I just read Claire Cain Miller’s wonderfully observant article in yesterday’s New York Times business section on Tech’s Damaging Myth of the Loner Genius Nerd. Miller does a tremendous job of examining the ramifications of building a company around hard skills like technical proficiency instead of softer skills, such as dealings with humans.
The launchpad for this conversation comes from the memo (penned by the former Google engineer) that made waves last week. The dated stereotype that the author touts of gender superiority in the engineering ranks is an old, tired story. Almost any gender bashing rant is a cover for some kind of insecurity, which led Miller to a thoughtful investigation of the roots of the machismo that is tied to technical proficiency:
Early on, children who are less comfortable with social interaction — particularly boys, who are more likely to be socialized that way — are channeled toward science and engineering, he said. Teachers generally focus on the technical aspects and not the interpersonal ones. The result is a field filled with people who dislike social interactions and have been rewarded for it.
We have a culture within tech that reinforces the myth that hard skills are the only skills of worth, or the only path to recognition, success and growth. The fact that we’ve gotten to a point where knowing and empathizing with people, including your customers, is seen as a frivolous skill set speaks to how engineering driven cultures dominate Silicon Valley. If the leaders in tech continue to condone, if not exhort, an exclusionary, isolationist mentality — the future of these companies will be a reflection of that choice. Which means less diversity of gender, race or non-engineering expertise infiltrating the products that we consume.
And what do you get when you pair technical superiority with a detachment from your end user?
As Miller dutifully points out, there are countless examples where technical competency was not enough in and of itself to produce successful product outcomes. She writes:
Technical skills without empathy have resulted in products that have bombed in the market, because a vital step to building a product is the ability to imagine how someone else might think and feel. “The failure rate in software development is enormous, but it almost never means the code doesn’t work,” Mr. Ensmenger said. “It doesn’t solve the problem that actually exists, or it imagines a user completely different from actual users.”
So what is the strategy to combat technical isolationism? At IBM we use Design Thinking — a tactical approach to leveraging personal and professional diversity to solve problems for actual users. At its core, Design Thinking is reliant on a breadth of perspectives. Engineers, marketers, designers, business managers and sales reps all have critically different vantages on what it takes to solve customer problems. We need to be working in concert with each other in order to have successful outcomes.
IBM prides itself on its inclusivity and quantifies the value of diversity on product teams, with differences in gender, race and orientation being valuable assets to forge more thoughtful cross examination of highly complex problems.
On Watson Education, we use Design Thinking to ensure that our products empower our users. If we assume we know what teachers and students need without ever talking to them, our products are guaranteed to fail. We need to deeply understand what motivates a teacher and what we can do to make their lives simpler and easier. We cannot assume we know the answers. Our team of researchers, designers, data architects and engineers have to work together with our users to help define our strategy and our solutions.
Engineering cannot operate in a vacuum and cannot exist as a monoculture. We have to work together and continue to invite people who are different from us into the conversation — for the sake of our users, our teams and our businesses as a whole.
Colin Narver is a Design Lead on Watson Education in Austin. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
