What are the best ways to develop empathy for your product's target audience?

The absolute best way is to use the product. Every day you need to walk the walk of the customer, feel their pain points and then inspire the team to make changes. You need to make sure each designer, manager, developer, marketer and PR team member knows the product inside and out and can be the first and best customer.

There are three tools which get you closest to the user : 1. Using the product yourself: This is equivalent to 'walking in your user's shoes'. Once you experience your product the way your actual users are, you start understanding both the gaps and delights better 2. Talking to the users: There is no substitute for an honest conversation with the users. A crucial angle here is to ensure your questions are not leading and neutral so as to not bias the insights 3. Customer Support Tickets: For any product, most power users are also the CS ticket raisers. Dealing with such tickets yourself or doing a deep dive will keep you close to the core user issues for your product

1. Consumer visits, user immersions (self driven) with the purpose of really understanding their lives, apart from observing product usage and decoding the motivations around the product. Keeping an eye on the problems consumers are trying to solve and what delights them - without being bound by product's current scope. 2. Spending time at the stores where the purchase takes place, with the new customers and with the sales promoter who is constantly interacting with intending buyers. 3. Using the product yourself and constantly wearing the user and customer hat during the product's development. I have found the above to be very helpful, apart from regular research- primary and secondary, and all the other suggestions listed so far.

Whether you are building physical products or software products, you need to create a development process by where the people actually building the products e.g., engineers, developers and PMs truly understand the “who” and “why” of the product. All development needs to be done through a customer centric lens. Too often empathy for the target audience resides solely with marketing or support. This mindset needs to make its way into the product development cycle as well.

I suggest practicing active listening skills. Sounds simple but when you take the time to acutely listen to a person's needs and situation you can tailor your business response in a constructive way. In too many experiences I've seen capable sales people miss the mark early in the engagement which hinders any relationship being established. Listening allows specificity and a solution based approach. It's easy to lean on your go to pitch but one size doesn't fit all.

Listening audience without an internal voice - Sales individuals easily get into the trap of internal voice. We may easily frame what the audience says with what we want to sell. It is not a matter have how much information we read from the audience. It is about how we digest the information with our internal voice interference. - It is difficult, and sometimes feels like a waste of time, putting aside the sale hat is crucial. - One thing we may want to try... listening to the audience as if we want to invest or own their business. We may understand the audience differently.

Dedicate the day to exploring various communication channels. - Emails - Chat logs - Blog comments - Forum threads - Social media mentions Gather both positive feedback and criticisms. Use these insights to refine and adjust your strategies accordingly. This monthly check ensures you're always in tune with your audience's feelings and needs.

Host an online insights community! Reading responses to posted topics as well as member-generated discussions and regular polling is illuminating. This is especially true if you/your sales team are not really representative of the customer. This agile research method demands empathy and thoughtful interactions with customers and fans.

Building empathy into a product or service should be a strategic design thinking process. It requires fundamental understanding the target audience. Some methods for cultivating empathy could be: - Conducting in depth user research to grasp TA behaviors and pain points - Developing detailed user personas that represent emotional drivers by segments - Walking in consumers shoes by experiencing the product from the user's perspective - Actively listening and paying attention consumer words, tone, and body language - Empathy mapping by creating visual empathy maps to comprehend audience needs - Conducting periodic user testing to identify usability and improvement areas - Sharing user stories that humanize the TA experiences (storytelling)

Using the Jobs To Be Done questioning framework uncovers deep detail that is often overlooked by most go to market teams. Dig deeper, "why is that important?", "and then?" Play back what they said incorrectly so they correct you and provide greater context.

1. Start by outlining the key steps your audience takes while interacting with your product or service. 2. For each step, denote the emotions they might feel, from frustrations to joys. 3. Clearly identify areas where they may experience difficulties or hurdles. 4. If you have feedback or reviews, use actual quotes from users to illustrate their feelings at each stage. 5. Engage with team members across different departments (like sales, customer support, or design) to gather diverse perspectives on the user experience.

Make sure you aren't adding bias into any observation of your audience. It's so easy to subconsciously make assumptions and only target a small subset of your total audience. This will be a big miss in terms of getting useful insights.

Observation is the most powerful way to gain empathy for your user in my opinion. But to do so properly takes some careful planning and ground work. You have to be there as a silent observer. You cannot give any insight, or get in anyone's way or the results will be less than natural. If you have questions or want to dive deeper into something that was said or done, take a note and have a debrief after the observation where you can ask questions. My favorite artifact for doing these observation sessions are empathy maps. If you are unfamiliar with empathy maps, they are simply a diagram of what the user/customer does, thinks, says, and feels. They can be incredibly powerful collections of information once you return to design work!

Observation is such a valuable tool. It's important to remember different personas in your observations. This could be an admin vs. non-admin user, or in the case of B2B2B or B2B2C two entirely different parties. Some examples of this from my career: survey makers and survey takers (SurveyMonkey), document senders and document signers (DocuSign), General Contractors and Specialty Contractors (Procore). Especially with software that enables productivity, if you're North Star Metric requires multiple people/parties to participate, each needs a seamless experience.

My favorite way to observe audiences is engaging with them at tradeshows or conferences. There's no better way to have a genuine conversation with someone than when you are learning and interacting with them in person and outside of an interview-style research setting. You have so much to learn from them and vice versa in many cases.

In product development, the Pragmatic Institute's statement, “Your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant,” offers a powerful reminder. It highlights the essential shift from personal biases to a deep understanding of user needs and wants. By integrating human-centered design, we're better equipped to craft solutions that resonate with users' actual needs. And by viewing outcomes through the user's lens, we get a clearer picture of our performance. In the end, solutions that genuinely understand and address user needs are often the ones that scale the fastest.

Hypothesis creation is the easier part. I see two more difficult components to handle: getting buy-in and selecting the right metrics to test. Many of us execute at very small levels like changing an ad set while retaining the same media strategy. We know that small steps yield small results but have no choice because mangement might not be convinced of the potential of experiementation and dont provide budget for a big enough scale. Marketers therefore need to master the art of conviction in the boardroom. Being data obsessed with metrics is a rabbit hole and presents the 2nd difficult thing to do - how to measure. My advice is to just look at the final ROI and 1 more North Star metric that's non-negotiable. That's it!

👀 When it comes to testing assumptions, it is crucial to be imaginative in order to think of as many possible outcomes that we can test our hypotheses. ☝️ A guess or a hunch could be valid, and best tested against actual findings.

Conduct usability testing to assess how intuitive your product is for users. Observing users navigate through the interface can reveal potential usability issues and validate assumptions about the effectiveness of the design in meeting user needs. This approach combines quantitative and qualitative methods, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of user interactions and helping you build a product that resonates effectively with your target audience.

In my experience agile way of testing is the best way . Following BML framework build - measure - learn and repeat quickly. Once you have defined the metrics measure them , quickly learn and adapt.

Remember that if your competitor is presenting in a certain way or building a certain feature, that does NOT mean that you should do the same. If you are obsessed with understanding a day in the life of your customer, you will understand the jobs you need to do. That is true north. Your competitors' actions, then, aren't something you must answer tit-for-tat. Instead, your competitors' actions can be helpful examples for you. Maybe they built a feature you didn't think of. Maybe they marketed better than you did. Maybe they solved a problem in a way you hadn't considered. All of those can be useful within the context of what problems you're solving for your customer.

(!) Always set aside time each month to sift through competitor customer reviews on platforms like Trustpilot or G2. Not only will you discover pain points that your product might address, but you'll also identify areas where your competition excels. It's an effortless way to stay ahead and keep your product relevant

Understanding your competitor's offering can help you to segregate a customer's asks into required and aspirational. While a product addresses many pain points, it may not solve for everything that the customer might need. Sometimes even customers might not be aware if their ask is aspirational or very customized to their context. Bringing in an 'industry perspective' about the capabilities available in the market into a conversation might help the customer as well. It could save a lot of time for them.

Understanding your approach to market vs your competitor's approach is very key. There are rarely 2 companies in the same field shooting for the same outcomes. While it's important to watch competition and learn, it's equally important to be grounded in your own path to market success.

Keep a close eye on competitors' pricing strategies. Understanding how competitors price their products can help you make informed decisions about your own pricing structure, ensuring competitiveness while providing perceived value to customers. You can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the market landscape, identify strategic opportunities, and make well-informed decisions that contribute to the overall success and differentiation of your product or service.

(!) Once a month, take a day to be your product's own customer. Use it without any insider knowledge, note down your feelings, and confront any frustrations head-on. It's a grounding exercise that often uncovers aspects we overlook. Plus, it reignites the passion for why you started the product in the first place!

People don't empathize with personas. They emphasize with people. Storytelling is great way to develop customer empathy across your organization. Find a customer that exemplifies the pain points of a typical customer and tell their story using vivid language and as many memorable details as possible.

Recently I read a quote from the CEO of NoWait, Ware Sykes that said "When I joined NoWait in 2013 as CEO, the founders suggested I work a couple of hosting shifts seating guests at one of our restaurant-chain partners, to witness first-hand the friction our company was working to solve. It was, undoubtedly, the scariest and most sobering professional experience of my life..." This impacted me because while data and observation (from the outside) are useful there is significant value in truly feeling the pain you're trying to solve.

Will you use the product yourself if you were exactly what your personas were like? If yes, great. If not, ask why and start building on it.

This is my favourite aspect as it describes the need for empathy. If you are able to put yourself into someone else's shoes, you have an easier time to imagine the challenges they are facing and how to maybe help them solve them. Personally, I feel this is a real superpower, as it makes you realize thought-processes and needs of others.

All of the above are great... but are doomed to be incomplete because it's always done from the outside. Try this instead: SPEND A DAY IN THEIR SHOES! Ask to shadow a client. Visit their facility or one of their locations. Try to do what they do (with your solution, the competitions, or no solution at all in place). Truly BECOME them for a day. There is a reason the adage is "walk a mile in my shoes" not "watch me walk a mile"

Empathy should be more than a tactic; it should be a core part of our organizational culture. Encourage teams across the company, from product development to customer service, to prioritize understanding and addressing customer needs and experiences. Markets and consumer behaviors are always evolving, so our empathy approach should be dynamic. Regularly update your buyer personas and journey maps as you gain new insights. While empathy focuses on qualitative understanding, it should be complemented with data-driven insights. Analytics help validate the emotional and subjective understandings we develop through empathy. This combination ensures that our strategies are both human-centered and results-oriented.

The points in this article are good, but there are 2 things you can do to really be top notch. 1. Do your target customer's job. Or try to. That's the quickest way to realize and feel what they're going through. If there's no way to actually do their job, try shadowing and ask a ton of questions while you do it. You probably have a few good customer relationships who'd be happy to let you. 2. Get to know yourself better. So many marketers talk about understanding customers, but can't tell you why they make the decisions they make or act the way they act. The better you understand your own motivations, behaviors, and thought processes, the better you'll be able to empathize with customers.

Create a “day in the life” blog series or a webinar with a panel of customers or partners with the same role. These are a great way to educate internally and provide insights for smaller teams or junior people can how the roles work inside other organizations. It’s all good for SEO too.

Look beyond the 'traditional audience'. Products often evolve beyond their original intent due to factors like trial and error, word-of-mouth, and cost-effectiveness. In response, marketers should broaden their audience, embracing these new applications while offering guidance. Eg: 3M's Post-It Notes, were also used as bookmarks. Recognizing this, they introduced the "Post-It Index" product line. Similarly, Eno, originally an antacid, is used as baking soda. In these cases, customers adapted products to meet their unique needs. Marketers must be willing to explore beyond their traditional audience to consider new possibilities and audiences they may not have initially thought of, allowing for product evolution and a broader customer base.