“When customers love your product, they become ambassadors. There’s nothing better than someone using your app every day and trying to get their friends and family to do the same.”
– Tom Padula, Senior Product Manager at SiriusXM
When you hear the word “empathy”, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? Simply, I felt empathy is to think and act based on the other person’s perspective. Let us see the definition from Berkley Education’s magazine as
The term “empathy” is used to describe a wide range of experiences. Emotion researchers generally define empathy as the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling.
In this blog, we are going to see Why Empathy is Essential for a Product Manager and tips to become empathetic from my experience.
Empathy in Product Management
Empathy in product management means being able to be a down-to-earth person to listen and observe and to learn and adapt to do action with compassion. Without empathy, you can’t build the product with the right solution.
Empathy is a skill that needs to be built by doing.
Next, we are going to see the top 3 tips to become better at Empathy.
- Listen
- Learn
- Act
Listen
The foremost thing is you have to interact with others. Reach out and schedule the meetings, casual conversations.
As a Product Manager, you have to interact with your users weekly to interact, understand how they are working in the product, and watching how they are interacting in the product. It will give in-depth information to you and you will be surprised how your customers are using the product in an unexpected way. Don’t forget to take notes while you are doing these conversations.
Learn
Awesome, you have the notes from the conversations. Review the notes and share them with the team. I loved this quote from Jeff Bezos “Be stubborn on vision, be flexible on the details. You have to remember this key point, you can empathize with the customers, the team but at any time you should not leave from your vision. So, before taking these insights into action.
Act
Next, we are going to see how you can act on the received insights. Validate these insights and research on the solutions. Then provide the best solutions to the customers. When you implement a new solution for the received feedback or insight the cycle should be short. For example, the solutions should be implemented sooner and ship it fast with the beta version(a closed group of customers/users) and show it to the customer or user who has originally requested it. In this way, you will receive feedback on the solution early and the customers/users also will be happier that they are also part of this journey.
When you embrace the customer’s feedback, it will lead your customers to become brand ambassadors for your product and they will spread their delights with their friends & family.
References:
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/empathy/definition