How can empathy bring you closer to success? An organization´s tale
Tan tan tan tannnnnnn!!!! (Epic music beginning in the background…)
Have you heard of empathy? Most probably yes. As a child, you were likely taught that “you should put yourself in others’ shoes,” but it’s easier said than done, right? But how does this reflect on an organization? Empathy between co-workers? Well, that is important. Of course But…I am here to tell you about an interesting story that made us further improve how product development matches “user” expectations.
First, a little bit of context
We are a company where technical and engineering expertise is as paramount as oxygen is for us humans. One other attribute essential to us is its people. Everybody here embodies our values, but for our tale, let´s focus on the engineering side.
We have an amazing Product Engineering team focused on implementing the best products, and a fantastic Customer Success (CS) team, ready to prepare and deliver our products to the client and adapt them to their needs. Both teams have great challenges on their hands and very interesting opportunities to grow.
Speaking of growing, Feedzai is growing a lot, really A LOT. With growth comes new challenges, and empathy is something that needs nurturing.
Which type of empathy am I talking about? Feeling what your users feel. For Product Engineering, the CS team is one of its key personas as they are the first one to feel the pain. Some of these pains were being cried over more than they should have been. So we decided to take matters into our own hands. #oneteam
Enter empathy sessions
Out of the blue, we found this tweet by Kelsey Hightower, a reference in the software community, where he stated…
I’m running a Customer Empathy session where I put our Kubernetes engineers through the same challenges our customers face. I’ve not had this much fun in years!
And we got INSPIIIIIIRED!!!! “Let´s do it and see what happens!,” We promptly said. “Rolling up sleeves mode” was ON.
Rolling out
After some analysis through the community on how others were doing, we conceptualized the “Product Engineering Empathy Challenges.” It was structured into the following 3 phases:
1 — Challenge gathering
- Customer Success developers and data scientists were able to propose a set of challenges faced by them and that they would dare the Product Engineering team to tackle.
- All the submitted challenges were published and we started the…VOTING stage.
- After 2 weeks, our teams were able to vote on the challenge that, in their perspective, could bring more benefit for their daily jobs.
- Voting closure followed by 2nd phase announcement.
2 — Challenge selection
- Challenges were triaged and ordered by ↑ impact VS ↓ complexity so that they could be properly prioritized.
- The Top 2 most voted challenges per product area would be confirmed and published, and the 3rd phase would be announced.
3 — Challenge execution
- Product Engineering teams were assigned 1 full day to evaluate the challenge and approach it in the best way they could. This could be as simple as emulating the challenge to confirm it is really a pain and providing groomed tasks to product backlog OR even solving it the best way possible with the given time.
- As we must celebrate successes, Product Engineering and CS joined forces to share their conclusions together in a presentation.
What about THE feedback and end result?
Both Product Engineering and CS were happy with the end result. Product Engineering was enlightened with so much knowledge they gathered, and CS was glad that these kind of initiatives were blooming.
Summing it up
As you can see, experimentation is at the heart of Feedzai. We can try and fail, but if we continuously keep going, we indeed raise our chances of success.
If you see that you are aligned and empathizing with us, please check our job openings and you will definitely find something juicy that will fill your heart :)
