Pushing Your Way Through to Compassion
It may just be me but I doubt that the 1987 classic, The Chipmunk Adventure, was produced with the intention of making small children cry. However, soon after it was released on VHS to my neighborhood Blockbuster Video, that is exactly what it did.
As a five-year-old, I was so excited to watch the movie. As it progressed, it seemed to be exciting and as the title mentions, filled with adventure. Everything was on the up-and-up until partway through, an unassuming and adorable baby penguin was kidnapped from its mother and given as a present to Brittany, the ring-leader of the Chipettes.
As the Chipettes took off in their hot air balloon toward their next stop, the youngest Chipette, Eleanor, noticed that the baby penguin looked sick and depressed. The movie then segwayed into a heartwrenching lullaby called, “My Mother, That’s Who I Need”, layered atop a sentimental montage of flashback videos of the baby penguin with its mother.
Like the little girl in the screenshot below (video link), my overflowing heart filled my face with tears.
Little did I know then but this memory would become one of my earliest experiences with empathy.
Empathy and Product Management
Empathy is an imperative ingredient in human connection, “because it helps us understand the perspectives, needs, and intentions of others.”1
Knowing that one of our main goals as product managers is to see and understand the needs of our customers so we can create solutions for them, it makes sense that empathy would be essential for effective product management.
Empathy Starts With Sympathy
To understand empathy better, let’s look at sympathy. Sympathy is the beginning of common ground between two people. It is “feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune, [an] understanding between people, common feeling.”2
Sympathy is helpful as we learn to relate to others and their experiences through our own cognitive understanding and experience.
While sympathy allows us to seek commonality, the downside is that if we stop there, we stay in our intellect where we are more likely to view ourselves as separate from others and their reality. Sympathy also leaves room for judgment, criticism, assumptions, and one-sided conclusions.
Sympathy in Product Management: if we stop our investment and connection with our customers at sympathy (including those inside our company like support, sales, etc.) we diminish our ability to explore and relate to their pain to find important insights.
Example: Imagine you are ending a feedback call with a customer. They’ve explained their frustration with a feature of yours that they have been using for months. Sympathy for your customer would start and end with you saying something like, “I feel bad that you’ve had to do deal with this issue. Thanks for helping me understand the problem. I will add it to our feedback list.” Not the worst response but also not as satisfying as it could be.
Stepping Up to Empathy
Empathy is a noticeable step up from sympathy in the connectedness world.
It is “the ability to understand and share the experiences of another.”3 To be able to see the situation from his or her point of view, rather than from our own.
As we seek for empathy, we recall feelings from our own similar experiences in order to apply them to the feelings we view or perceive in someone else; our brains seek to assimilate what another is seeing, hearing, and feeling.
Unlike sympathy, true empathy does not make room for judgment. Whether you deem someone’s pain as worthy of attention or not, when it comes to empathy, it is.
Empathy does not require an exact shared experience, only a desire to connect with and understand the other person. It allows us to sit with others while they feel or express pain, fear, sorrow, and even joy.
Empathy in Product Management: As product managers, our conscious desire and effort to practice empathy is what grants us access into the emotional trenches of our customer’s experience. If we can get into and stay in a space of empathy long enough, we will find our customer’s heaviest problems to be solved.
Empathy is a major ingredient in improving customer conversation. Helping people feel like their problems are important and are being prioritized communicates that you are on the same team.
Example: Consider the same example scenario that we used above but this time let’s apply empathy. Empathy for your customer changes the whole feeling and depth of connection. It might lead you to say something like, “Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. From what I’m hearing, I can tell that this is really frustrating. I would feel the same way if I were you. No one wants to use a feature that’s taking that much extra time.”
Find Four Empathy Growth Hacks, here.
Compassion: Taking Empathy to the Next Level
Empathy can only be outdone by compassion. “While empathy refers more generally to our ability to take the perspective of and feel the emotions of another person, compassion is when those feelings and thoughts include the desire to help.”4
Compassion changes everything for us as product managers; it is where knowledge and feelings related to a problem turn into action.
Relating back to The Chipmunk Adventure, empathy was the catalyst for the song but compassion is what made the Chipettes risk losing the adventure race to return the baby penguin to its mother.
Compassion in Product Management: As product managers, compassion is what drives us to invest in building solutions that solve real, painful, and sometimes, hidden problems for our customers. It transforms us from thinkers and feelers into empathetic creators and doers, no matter the cost or effort.
Example: Referencing our example scenarios above, empathy transformed the conversation from an intellectual one into a feeling one. By pushing through to compassion, you might be motivated to say something like, “I can tell from how you’re describing this issue, that it is painful. Honestly, I’m with you there; I‘d feel the same way. I want to talk with my team to see what ideas or solutions we can come up with and will personally reach out to you once we have a fix.”
Getting to Empathy and Compassion
The best product solutions are identified during the practice of empathy and executed through the practice of compassion.
Pushing beyond sympathy and empathy into compassion is a process that can become more natural as you consciously make an effort to deeply connect with your customers and their pain. With effort and time you can grow in your capacity to sit with your customers in order to intellectually and emotionally understand them. Then using that understanding as motivation, take action to identify and deliver the right and best solution.
