Designing Empathy–Learning to Walk in Your Customers’ Shoes

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You are a Product Owner working hard to maintain a value-driven product backlog. That means you continually check in with what you mean by value. For us, that means checking in with your customers in new heartfelt ways. What adds value to them? What provides them function, commodity and delight? How can you act in love and service to them? Designing empathy into your product feature sets brings you into a deep relationship with your customers. Design from your head and heart to your customers’ head and heart. Fortunately for all of us as product owners, George Kembel and his team at the d.School at Stanford University have been working for a number of years on approaches to help us develop customer empathy and to act on it. Having had the good fortune of working with George and his brother John, we have created a design empathy approach that draws from the d.School work. We have added some of our own brainstorming divergence and convergence approaches for data collection and knowledge massaging. This session affords you the opportunity to learn how to conduct our set of empathy activities: from empathy interviews all the way through a complete “problem” statement. Interactively in a workshop setting, we’ll work in small teams to complete 2 of the steps of the overall process.