Empathy for Users as a Product Manager
March 29, 2017 by Paul Lopushinsky
This post is a continuation of two previous posts.
- Playing the Blame Game with Your Users
- As a Product Manager, Do You See Users as People Or Dollar Signs?
Empathy for users is one of the most important things you need to work on as a product manager.
To define empathy:
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
It’s very easy to lose empathy when your job as a product manager has you immersed in your product.
You’re likely spending 40+ hours a week with your product. You know the ins and outs of the product. It’s your job, your career.
Depending on your product, your users may spend very little time with it.
- Perhaps your product is something that users use daily (think Facebook)
- Perhaps they use it daily at work (think task tracking software)
- Perhaps they use it once or twice a week, for 20 minutes, or for 20 seconds. (think something like Mint for budgeting)
- Perhaps they use it once a month for 15 minutes (think something like bill management), or once a year for a couple of hours (think tax software)
Your product is not their world, and you need to realize this in order to develop empathy for the user.
We all know developers who think users are dumb.
Do you do the same thing?
Realize that your product is very likely a tiny, TINY fraction of a user’s life. It’s not their world — it’s just a product.
For all you know, perhaps a vast majority of your users are forced to use your product at work, and they are indifferent or dislike the product. I know at various jobs we used products that I didn’t think were the greatest.
So, when you and your team wonder why users can’t figure out your product, or when they make feature requests that you have no idea of where they came from, you’re confused because you can’t seem to understand what the product means to them.
But, unless you go out and talk to and observe users, you’re not going to be able to develop empathy for them.
You can’t exactly walk a mile in their shoes, but at the very least you can follow along as they walk this mile.
Here are some means to help build empathy for the users.
- Understand what the product means to them. As I mentioned earlier, perhaps it’s something they use once a week, or use it on the daily. Figure out what it means to them.
- Realize that the product is not their world. While obvious, it can be incredibly easy to forget that they’re not spending 40+ hours immersed in your product. They have their own lives and jobs to go about.
- If you’re new to a company, that’s one of the best times to build empathy for the user. You are new to the company, and depending on their product, you might be new to the product as well. You’re learning the ins and outs of the product. At this stage, you’re going to have customers who are more familiar with the product than you are. That’s an interesting stage of learning that can allow you to develop empathy for the user.
- GO TALK WITH AND OBSERVE YOUR USERS! The most obvious of the bunch, but it can surprise you. If you’re not talking and observing what users are doing, it’s extremely easy to lose that empathy you had for them.
What have you done lately to build empathy with your users?
Originally published at www.pmpaul.com on March 29, 2017.
