Radical Empathy

A mindset shift to unlock radical innovation

Why do some products see wild success while some others see a very short life? Why are some founders wildly successful while many aren’t. While there might be many reasons for this, one of the key differences is empathy. Solutions that are built on the foundation of empathy helps teams identify unmet needs in the market that translate into opportunities. In this post you will learn the following practical ways you can learn about your customers to unlock your next big innovation.

1. Creating a learning plan before you start

2. How to learn from customers directly

3. Ways to immerse yourself in customer context

4. Scaling your learning

5. Learning about the full context of people

To gain a deep understanding of people, their joys, their lives, their struggles, their environments, their neighborhoods and a full context of their lives. Such learning will not just help you understand customer’s problems but also innovate a future that they might not have imagined.

Empathy goes beyond the shared perspective of emotions. It is the ability to understand a customer combined with a will to solve their problems. To be customer centric, people don't always have to shed a tear but those who are inspired by their customer's problems to be obsessed to solve them are truly empathetic. Empathy, sometimes, gets an eye roll because it is so overused. But there are thousands of examples of success stories rooted in empathy. True empathy is radically different from simple customer interviews or “research”. Is is a deep understanding of their full lives. It is feeling their pain, their needs, what works for them and what gets in the way. It is the inventing a future that makes their lives better. It is taking bets on solutions by obsessively focusing on the customer’s unspoken needs.

Warning: Truly radically successful innovation doesn’t happen just because you gain radical customer empathy. Success comes from gaining radical empathy, identifying which of your customer problems you can actually solve in ways that only you can uniquely solve. In this article, I am only focusing on the first. I will talk about the other two in later articles.

How do you get beyond the superficial understanding of a customer and gain radical empathy?

1. Laying a strong foundation: Just like anything in life, we need to be thoughtful about our learning as well. Specially when it comes to learning about customers. While, we can go really broad and just learn about everything about everybody, that is not effective. I have never walked away from any conversation with a customer not learning something. Because of this fact, it is easy to always feel like our research is successful even when it might not be effective. If we are not careful we would be spending a lot of time, effort and money in learning things that might not be as relevant to the problem we are solving or in discovering opportunities. To be effective, we should lay a strong foundation. I always start any customer discovery with the following critical steps

   • Leveraging different perspectives on the team to define goals

   • Learn from what others might have already done before

   • Define learning objectives

   • Train teams on Discovery techniques and show a peek into the plan

   • Lay the foundation of an open mind and focusing on the problems and not solutions

   • Identify customer segments to learn from

   • Identify your learning methods

   • Create interview guides

   We have access to immense amount of data about any topic. There is no need to reinvent the wheel for broad research. For ex., when I was leading a team to learn about underserved customers in Mexico, we found a lot of published research. This helped us start from a higher ground. We were able to start with richer hypothesis of what problems they might be facing in general. It helped us identify some personas of people we would benefit learning from. Our exercise to formulate hypothesis was much richer. Income and economic reports of the country broken down by geographic locations helped us narrow down which cities, towns and villages we wanted to visit and which to avoid. Teams might sometimes feel impatient in getting started but this upfront work is going to be immensely valuable in helping them with be better planned and more effective.

2. Learn directly from people: Once you lay a strong foundation, start by learning from people . There are several methods you could use to learn from customers. Based on your resources and needs, you can do so in multiple ways.

   • Customer interviews in their environments: There can be nothing more effective than meeting people where they are. Meeting them in their most comfortable and natural environments help unlock the most insights. I typically recommend meeting customers where they live or work to understand more of the context they live in. I have spent time in the homes of hundreds of people myself. The insights these visits have given me are priceless. If I did not visit them in person, I wouldn’t have seen the sick mother that the person was taking care of, the potato chip business a woman was running out of her backyard while her 10 year old daughter ran a small store near their front door, the family that lived in an upscale neighborhood but on govt support, the neatly organized bills, the credit card that was literally frozen in the freezer to delay spending urges, bills laid out under the glass of the dining table as a reminder to pay, a posting of family’s inability to pay their electricity bill publicly to shame them and the thousands of other contexts that helps us gain empathy to a customer’s life and not just what they say.

   • Digital interviews - This is another single person interview but done virtually. These have become extremely common because of the pandemic. This is a great tool for you to still stay in touch with customers and get a peak into their context but without getting the full context of the environment that a customer lives in.

   • In office interviews - Customers are brought onsite for teams to interact with. Typically there is a process that brings customers to company research centers on a regular basis and teams can interact with them. These are best for gaining insights into how your prototype, concept or product designs might or might not work for them.

   • Focus groups: Focus groups are often misunderstood. They are sometimes used to scale research by thinking of meeting 5 people at the same time instead of meeting one person at a time, thus saving time. However this is a bad way to use a focus group. The best use of focus groups are when you want to learn about social interactions or the dynamics between members of a group. It is also a great tool to use when you want to have rich disagreements between people.

   Key things to remember:

   • Inclusive research: Teams often forget to go broad in their learning. When you identify which customers to learn from, do not forget to be inclusive. Whether you are learning from 10 customers or 100, please ensure that you are learning from customers who are diverse. Diversity can be across many dimensions like age, race, income levels, introvert/extrovert, physical abilities, etc., An example of a classic mistake teams might make is to believe that inclusive research would mean to meet 50% men and 50% women. But, by not learning from out non-binary people, you will miss out a whole different perspective and will result in you building products that are not inclusive.

   • Learn what customers do, not what they say: People don’t always do things they say they do or the way they think they do. It is important for us to learn about what people really do. If Google had not paid attention to this and only listened to their customers then they would be showing 30 results on the initial search page instead of the hand full they do currently.

3. Customer Immersion: It is very easy to understand what customers tell us but sometimes to be able to really feel, visualize and empathize what they go through, we should immerse ourselves in their lives. We can do so by trying to go to places where they go, do the tasks they do, face the challenges they experience, etc., A group of us had created an immersion workshop where we take teams out for a few hours and have them do tasks that they never might have done in their life to get them an extreme doze of customer’s reality. This immersion has taken them to stores the might have never noticed. They might have to try and make $2 work to feed a family of four or figure out a way to make a last minute electricity bill payment with no access to banks., It is critical we immerse ourselves in customer context. There are a few strategies you can use to do so.

   • Task Immersion- Did the customer you meet talk about making a bill payment in the corner store? Try and find the store and see if you can do the same. Did they talk about shopping in a local fruit market, why don’t we take a trip to do the same? You will be surprised by the insights you gain by watching them do a task rather than hearing them share what they do. By doing this, my teams have discovered insights that would never be written about in any books or research publications. We found inspiration in the different products and how their UI worked or did not work because we chose to do the tasks that our customers mentioned.

   • Neighborhood immersion: Understanding customer neibhorhoods is an important context to understand. For ex., we found that when people went to get payday loans in a particular neighborhood in London, there are lesser chances of the money being put to the use that the loan was intended for. This was because there were gambling shops right next to these places and we saw a few people go from the payday lending store right next door to gamble.

     

   • Life immersion: There is nothing more immersive than actually living as close to the customer life as possible. Some teams do so by living in the same communities as the people they wish to serve for a few weeks to completely experience the lives of their customers. There are also some extreme stories like that of four young friends who set out to live on just $1 a day for two months in rural Guatemala and documented their journey to truly understand what it means to live under a $1 a day.

4. Power of Observational learning

   • Informed observations: Whenever a customer says they do so something, I like asking them to show what and how they do it. There is immense power in observing and actually seeing what people do rather than just listen to them narrating about the task. For ex., a Gilette customer could describe on the phone or on video how they shaved. But when a P&G team actually watched a young man shave and the steps he takes before and after, they learnt a lot more. If they hadn’t actually followed the young man and watched him go about his task, they wouldn’t have seen his family go to fetch water from the tap in the street or how he uses a small cup of water. They identified customer’s unspoken needs that they might have never imagined as seen in this P&G video - Providing a Better Shave for More than a Billion Men This inspired them to create Gillette Guard.

   • Natural Observation: Whenever I visit any place for research, I always make time to walk the streets and visit the local markets. These are not any fancy shopping malls but these are the spice markets in Israel or clothes markets in India or vegetable market in Mexico. This is where real life shows up. Even if I don’t understand the language, I understand a lot.

     

   • Shadowing customers: Human beings have a tendency to believe we do things better than how we really do. This is why it is always important for us to watch customers doing tasks that are important for us rather than just asking them to describe how they do so. For ex., if a customer talks about how they pay a bill, ask them do go about doing so while you watch. If they talk about how they keep a note in their wallet, ask to see their wallet

5. Scaled learning: It is critical for everybody to really gain empathy by walking in the shoes of customers and learning directly from them. There are always an opportunity to scale learning by learning from others who might have spent time with them too. Subject matter experts on topics can really help scale learning. You can achieve this by conducting organized interviews with subject matter experts who might have done research or worked on the problems you care about. Other sources of such scaled learning would be to talk to local nonprofits, thought leaders, researchers, etc.,

6. Contextual learning: Understanding the local contexts complete learning about customers. This means we have to understand local culture, behaviors, regulations, other offerings in the markets to completely understand what works and what might not. For ex., if you are building a financial app for women in villages where women don’t have the social or economic independence to have their own phones, then your solution won’t take off. You have to keep the insight of a shared phone in mind.

Impact of radical empathy on our lives beyond our products

Radical empathy doesn’t go only one way. By walking in the shoes of customers and gaining empathy for them, their lives, their spoken and unspoken needs, we are not only able to unlock innovation but it also has a profound impact in our lives.

I hope all of you have an opportunity to experience radical empathy and experience the impact it can have on your life or the inspiration it might unlock in you.