What the city of love taught me about empathy and building products
Empathy 101: what is empathy and why it is essential for building products
Empathy is the ability to understand what others are experiencing as if we were feeling it ourselves. It is the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. Empathy becomes crucial when building great products because it is the driving force behind genuinely understanding our customers and users, and therefore being able to provide the most value to them and achieve the highest impact. Empathy is also hard. It is difficult to distance ourselves from our values, habits, needs, and goals, and to think about someone else’s as the most important ones. It is hard to prioritize and make choices based on what other people would feel or want, but this is a core piece of what makes a great product manager: the ability to empathize with both the user and the business. Moving abroad is a path towards developing empathy.
Value drives behavior
Before diving into empathy and my experience abroad, I find it useful to explain how values and behaviors connect: values drive behaviors. When looking beneath the surface of decision-making, there is a core value that drives each decision both in product development and in life. In life, an example can be: I value flexibility; therefore, I work for a company that allows me to have flexible hours and work from various locations. For a product, it can be that our users value making connections; therefore, we will build features that will enable them to share what they find meaningful. The connecting thread is that we are all people, and our users are real people that have real needs, wishes, goals, behaviors, and values.
Living Abroad Builds Empathy
When moving abroad, mundane and trivial actions become different, challenging, and even frustrating. When I moved from the United States to Paris, I had core values that had been shaped both by my personality and by where I had lived. One of my core values was convenience. Convenience was critical to me, and I would argue, very important for the American set of values. Convenience drives a lot of decisions in the United States, such as extended opening hours, 24–7 drugstores, and banks opening on Saturday. I came to Paris with convenience ingrained in how I make decisions and perceive the world. Since I valued convenience, it was easy to assume that other people did too, so I behaved as if they did. I went to the bank on Saturday to find it closed. I then returned to the bank on Monday to also find it closed. In my mind, that was absurd. How could the bank be closed on Saturday and Monday? I needed to pay my rent! When the frustration dissipated after an espresso and people-watching in Montmartre, I started to rationalize the situation and try to understand what just happened and why I got so frustrated by it. I realized that I had been behaving in a way as if convenience, which was a value to me, was also valued in France. It was not. In France, people appreciate work-life balance considerably more than they value convenience. A lot of the decisions behind bank hours, the “summer closing,” which is when most stores and restaurants close for almost three months during the summer, and early closing hours, finally started making sense. The value that drove those decisions was an adequate work-life balance. As a new Parisian, I would continuously behave as if convenience was a driving factor for choices and behaviors in Paris because it was a value to me to ultimately find myself disappointed or frustrated when my interpretation turned out to be wrong. I then realized that it was not about me. It was about something much greater. I had different values than the place in which I lived, and I had been behaving as if this were not the case. I started seeing Paris as my opportunity to step out of my comfort zone, my values, and step into a Parisian’s shoes. Understand what they care about and why, and comprehend the meaning behind decisions. These were not my values, but they were the values of the people driving most day-to-day decisions, and it was on me to change my behavior.
Empathy and Product Management
As Product Managers very rarely, we are the core user of the product we are building, and even when that is the case, we are not every user, so it is always important to put yourselves in the shoes of the users and see the world as they do. Seeing the world as your users do extends far beyond the way they interact with your product. How early they wake up, how they take their coffee, what they value, the type of friends that they have, when they can go to the bank, are all behaviors and actions that could have a high impact on the success of your product. Living abroad somewhere that has different values than I do forced myself to see the world differently. It invited me to challenge my most intrinsic values and to learn to accept that what I believed to be right might not be right in every circumstance. It taught me that there is a set of values different than my own driving behaviors and decisions around me.
I can’t move to Paris, so what do I do?
The beauty of living abroad is that you get to experience a different set of values than your own. You are forced to see life through a different lens. Living abroad is not the only way you can achieve this. When you’re intentional about developing empathy, traveling to a different city, taking a different path to work, or trying something new can all be ways to leave your comfort zone and experience different values than your own.
Conclusion
There is an expression in French that is c’est comme ça, and it means “it is the way it is.” Once I understood that the set of values that Paris had were different than my own, it became considerably easier to build my life as a Parisian. I was able to understand that some things are just comme ça and it is essential to understand how they are, but there is no real point in allowing them to become frustrating. Every day I wake up thankful that I lived in a charming and beautiful city that continuously challenged me to see and live in the world differently. When you think about your life as your most important product, living somewhere new can be an amazing way to learn how to build empathy.
