4 Steps to Making Empathy Stick in the Product Development Process

I’ve spent the last two years working on products at Discuss.io that enable our users — product managers, marketers, and user researchers — to build connections with their users, wherever they are in the world. Product managers talk about anything and everything with their customers, things like the impact of hard water on people’s shampoo purchasing habits in Indonesia, all the way to personalization features in consumer apps, and the fine line between helpful and creepy.

Though companies may value the voice of the customer and want to incorporate user feedback into the product, it can be hard to shake people out of their assumptions or sell the case for building in time during the development process for research (the short answer there is that you can build a better product, which actually saves time and money).

There are a couple defined steps you can take to make empathy a core part of your product development process, start by putting one user front and center.

1. Tell the Story of One to Build Empathy

Humans are reliably unable to empathize with large groups of people, despite the recent popularity around emotional quotient, or EQ, and the idea that as robots take over the world, people skills will become paramount…