Summary
Empathy sticks with you. Applying empathy as a product designer will help keep your customers at the forefront of product design. Ross Smith is the Director of Engineering at Microsoft, and he discusses how he uses stories to engender empathy.
Key Insights
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Empathy connects early user research to agile development, enabling continuous customer-focused delivery.
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Stories like Joshi the toy giraffe create emotional resonance across all levels of an organization.
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Direct engagement with customers via communities or social media uncovers actionable product insights not visible via data alone.
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Pairing emotional customer stories with quantitative telemetry data helps prioritize engineering and design work effectively.
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Dogfooding in multiple rings—from engineers to marketing to external insiders—builds product empathy and usability awareness.
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Customer empathy maps help cross-disciplinary teams understand user thoughts, feelings, pain points, and motivators.
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Ride-alongs involving engineers and designers listening to support calls or transcripts foster deeper understanding of real user challenges.
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Celebrating user-driven successes publicly signals organizational values and encourages customer empathy culture-wide.
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Active participation in product-related social media and app store reviews provides timely feedback and opportunity to respond and improve.
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Empathy-backed development breaks down silos, improves prioritization, and accelerates iteration in cloud-based, agile products.
Notable Quotes
"Empathy sticks with you - an inspirational customer story will keep you thinking about the end user no matter where you work in the organization."
"Joshi the toy giraffe visiting the Ritz-Carlton spa and golfing became a story that resonated with anyone who touches the guest experience."
"Losing a Lego minifigure led to a heartfelt, personalized reply that empowered a child and connected product teams with users."
"Hakey in Norway used Skype to get through the grieving process by seeing and talking to his children across continents every day."
"Stories alone aren’t enough; you need to combine them with product telemetry and data to understand the broader customer experience."
"Engaging engineering teams directly in customer communities led to improvements like the Skype split window feature based on user feedback."
"In India, listening on Twitter uncovered unexpected credit card payment issues that product data alone couldn’t explain."
"Building a customer empathy map lets teams see what users think, feel, hear, and see when engaging with your product."
"Eating your own dog food creates multiple rings of feedback, from daily pre-release testers to marketing and external insiders."
"Ride-alongs with support agents and participating in social media discussions help engineers and designers truly experience customer issues."
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