Engineers play a crucial role in building products that customers love. But sometimes, there can be a fundamental empathy gap between engineers and the users they are building products for. Without walking in the customer’s shoes, engineers run the risk of making incorrect assumptions about user needs, prioritizing the wrong features, or completely missing the core problems their products should solve. I’ve seen this disconnect derail many well-intentioned products and features over the years. A lack of empathy leads to solutions in search of a problem, instead of addressing real customer needs. My goal with this post is to highlight some proven strategies for coaching engineers to think like customers and build empathy into their product development processes. Bridging this empathy gap results in much better product-market fit, user adoption, and satisfaction.
Coaching Engineers to Think Like Customers
Let’s dive into some impactful ways to immerse engineers in the customer experience so they can build products that customers truly love.
The Importance of Empathy in Product Development
Empathy is the ability to deeply understand other people’s perspectives, experiences, and motivations. For product teams, building empathy with users and customers is invaluable. When engineers tap into the customer’s viewpoint, they gain key insights that improve decision-making throughout product development.
Lacking empathy with users can undermine the product creation process in several ways:
- Building features users don’t need or want
- Overlooking or misunderstanding core customer problems
- Prioritizing solving issues that don’t impact customers
- Creating complicated products that are confusing to use
- Having key features rejected by users during testing
This gap between the engineer’s perspective and customer needs leads to poor product-market fit, low user adoption, and products that fail to meet business goals.
On the other hand, teams with high empathy have a deeper sense of which product improvements will truly resonate with customers. This results in:
- Higher customer lifetime value and satisfaction scores
- Increased product stickiness and engagement
- Reduced churn and higher retention
- Stronger word-of-mouth promotion and growth
According to research by Devbridge Group, companies that incorporate empathy have seen up to a 129% increase in NPS scores compared to competitors. Other studies have found design thinking exercises focused on boosting empathy doubled market share gains compared to traditional planning methods.
However, empathy does not always come naturally for engineers and technical teams. With their specialized knowledge and problem-solving abilities, it can be challenging to see things from the average user’s perspective. Engineers tend to prioritize logic, data, and optimizing technical elegance over understanding emotional and unspoken customer needs. They often wrongly assume that users think like them and will use products the same way they do.
Bridging this empathy gap requires intention, practice, and immersion in the customer experience. But organizations that coach engineers to become “empathy champions” reap huge rewards in building products loved by customers.
Strategies for Building Empathy
There are many impactful strategies engineering and product teams can use to build empathy with customers:
Spend time with real customers
- Interview customers one-on-one or in small groups to understand their needs, pain points, and experiences. Ask open-ended questions and go deep into specific examples and stories.
- Visit customers in their environments to observe first-hand how they use products and technologies in their daily lives.
- Have customers demo your product while sharing their thoughts out loud. This user testing reveals pain points and confusion you can’t detect alone.
- Establish an advisory council or customer panel that meets regularly to solicit ongoing feedback.
- Attend conferences and events your customers are interested in. Engage with them in person about their priorities.
- For B2B, go on sales calls and customer site visits. Watch how your product gets used in the real world.
The goal is to create as much first-hand exposure to real users as possible. Resist the temptation to rely on second-hand accounts or assumptive personas. Direct customer contact provides invaluable context and insights.
Gather and analyze customer data
- Conduct surveys to quantify customer opinions, needs, frustrations, and demographics.
- Review app store ratings, reviews, and social media mentions to identify common complaints and requests.
- Analyze usage data, behavioral trends, and support requests to spotlight areas of difficulty and confusion.
- Monitor support forums and calls to hear customer problems and feedback in their own words.
- Collect feedback from sales, marketing, and support teams that interact directly with customers.
Data should inform your empathy efforts, not replace them. Always combine metrics with real human conversations.
Role-playing and design thinking
- Conduct exercises where engineers role play as specific customer types to imagine their thinking patterns and obstacles.
- In design thinking workshops, have engineers map out customer journeys, pain points, and emotional states.
- Create “day in the life” scenarios for customers that engineers step through.
These activities help translate human behavior into concrete examples engineers can relate to.
Prototyping and testing
- Build wireframes, mockups, or prototypes early so customers can provide feedback and direction.
- Issue trials or betas of new features to detect usability issues before launch.
- Be prepared to quickly iterate based on customer reactions vs. stubbornly sticking to original plans.
Scheduling exposure
- Set up regular touchpoints between engineers and real customers for ongoing empathy building.
- Have engineers join customer support calls or meetings to hear issues first-hand.
- Look for opportunities for customers to provide feedback directly to engineering teams.
Solicit internal perspectives
- Connect with sales, marketing, support, and account management teams who interact regularly with customers.
- Learn from their experiences and have them share customer stories and feedback.
Storytelling and sharing
- Consistently communicate customer perspectives, use cases, frustrations, and needs with product and engineering teams.
- Storytelling makes the customer a real person rather than a generic concept.
With continuous exposure to these strategies, engineers can gain a powerful emotional understanding of the customer’s world.
Coaching Engineers as Empathy Champions
The best results come from directly coaching engineers on adopting an empathy mindset and a customer-focused way of thinking. Some techniques include:
Listening deeply
Teach engineers to listen without judgment, be curious, and ask the right probing questions. Guide them away from inserting their own opinions.
Reframing issues
Help engineers frame problems from the customer’s point of view. What is the customer trying to achieve? Where are they struggling? What matters most to them?
Self-awareness
Engineers should monitor their language and catch themselves making assumptions or using internal jargon. Are they explaining things clearly to outsiders?
Remembering the human
Remind engineers that users have emotions, obstacles, and perceptions that differ from their own. They experience frustration, confusion, joy, and trust.
Walking the journey
Engineers should visualize stepping through a process or experience as the customer would. What would this feel like? Where are the pain points?
Incorporating empathy into agile workflows can also be highly effective:
During planning, have engineers map out customer personas and journeys around specific features or experiences. How will this impact customers?
- Customer Representation
Include customer advocates in stand-ups, retros, and planning sessions to share input and stories. Have them weigh in on priorities and features.
- Visibility
Post customer quotes, pictures, or journey maps visibly around work areas. Create “customer data radiators” to reinforce empathy.
You can also recognize and celebrate particularly empathetic engineers to set an example for others. Consider empathy levels when hiring new engineers or appointing cross-functional “empathy guides”. Investing in empathy and communications training pays huge dividends.
Overall, engineers should feel continuously connected to customers. This understanding of their world leads to better solutions.
Measuring and Improving Empathy Levels
It’s important to measure empathy levels to understand progress and determine where more focus is needed. Some ways to track include:
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) show if customers feel heard and understood.
- Conducting customer interviews and coding feedback for themes related to feeling valued.
- Survey questions that measure perceptions of customer focus and empathy.
- Number of direct customer conversations, interviews, and visits completed by engineers.
- Hours spent in immersive customer research, virtual reality simulations, and design exercises.
- Testing emotional intelligence via EQ assessments before and after empathy training.
- Number of customer quotes, data points, and stories shared across engineering.
- Reduced escalations and complaints around lack of understanding.
The goal is to set a benchmark, and then continually improve empathy KPIs over time. Review progress in regular retrospectives. Iterate on strategies focusing attention where more empathy is needed. Share results cross-functionally to showcase the business impact of empathy. A little effort goes a long way when coaching engineers to become truly customer-focused.
Subscribe for free and never miss a post!
Coaching Engineers to Think Like Customers: Key Takeaways
Empathy is clearly critical, yet often overlooked in engineering cultures. Bridging this gap is imperative for building products and experiences that customers value and love.
Key takeaways for engineers include:
- Assume you don’t fully grasp the customer’s perspective – then work to truly understand it.
- Immerse yourself in the customer experience through direct exposure and conversations.
- Listen deeply and approach interactions with humility, not assumptions.
- Use data to supplement empathy, not replace authentic human connections.
- Practice self-awareness and re-framing issues from the customer’s shoes.
- Make empathy a cultural value through coaching, training, and leading by example.
As product leader, you have an amazing opportunity to influence your team’s empathy levels. I challenge you to pick at least one strategy from this post to try when coaching engineers to think like customers. Track measurable results and continue building on what works. With commitment and practice, empathy can become a core competency that propels product success.
