Breaking Barriers with Empathy
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
-
•
Empathy is crucial for embedding customer focus throughout product development and breaks down organizational silos vertically and horizontally.
-
•
Storytelling is a powerful tool for building empathy that sticks with employees across all roles and disciplines.
-
•
Customer stories, like Chris Hurd’s toy giraffe or Lego’s replacement minifigure, emotionally connect product teams to real user experiences.
-
•
Strong product telemetry and customer feedback data must supplement stories to provide representative and actionable insights.
-
•
Direct engagement with customers through communities, social media listening, and ride-alongs helps surface nuanced issues and user needs.
-
•
Building empathy maps across thinking, feeling, hearing, and seeing encourages multidimensional understanding of customer experience.
-
•
Dogfooding with multiple user rings—from daily internal users to external insiders—boosts practical empathy and early issue detection.
-
•
Celebrating empathy-driven successes publicly within the organization promotes a culture valuing customer-centric approaches.
-
•
Monitoring product perception via news aggregators and app store reviews reveals unexpected creative uses and real user sentiment.
-
•
Empathy-driven product improvements support agile development by aligning multi-disciplinary teams with prioritized customer needs.
Notable Quotes
"Empathy sticks with you; if I tell you an inspirational story about what a customer has done, you’ll remember it."
"Joshi the toy giraffe resonated with everyone on the team at the Ritz-Carlton, from chefs to spa attendants."
"Stories are great and build empathy, but how representative are those stories of the broader customer base?"
"Product telemetry and customer data bring the stories to life in aggregate and help prioritize engineering focus."
"The Skype engineers spent time in the community chatting with users and made product changes based on those conversations."
"Sometimes assumptions break down, like credit cards without expiration dates in India; you have to listen carefully to customers."
"Building a customer empathy map with thinking, feeling, hearing, and seeing quadrants helps teams understand different perspectives."
"Using your own product frequently through dogfooding creates empathy about ease or difficulty of use."
"Encourage everyone in the organization to read customer feedback and use data science tools like sentiment analysis to understand it."
"Celebrate customer-driven successes so the whole organization learns what’s valued and aspires to do the same."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"The black Buzz Rickson jacket came from a work of fiction by William Gibson and then was made real."
Matt WebbContext Window: Five Futures for AI
June 11, 2025
"Every time we say, I would prefer not to, we reclaim a little bit of agency."
Jemma AhmedTheme 1 Intro
March 10, 2026
"Shopify’s merchant frustrations tool tracks customer issues over time, making that knowledge available to all teams."
Alëna IouguinaDesigning Systems at Scale
November 7, 2018
"Your continued feeling of precarity is the point; the system requires your continuous adaptation as a source of labor."
Angelos ArnisOur Fragmented Identity
June 12, 2026
"Through this final set of speakers, we hope to inspire you with a pathway through this massive topic."
Uday GajendarTheme Four Intro
June 6, 2023
"I am not throwing away your UX."
Ana Maria Montero Barrantes Aditi Dhar Michelle Kaplan Nate Osborne Matt LaurenceThe Authentic UX Talent Show
January 8, 2024
"Feature bloat kills usability because it clouds the core value proposition."
Prayag Narula Hannah HudsonEmpowering Designers to do Good Research
March 11, 2022
"Citizen participation is like eating spinach—everyone agrees it’s good, but few actually do it meaningfully."
Aaron Stienstra Lashanda HodgeLeveraging Civic Design to Advance Equity and Rebuild Trust in the US Federal Government
December 8, 2021
"Over-researching vulnerable populations repeats colonial patterns of extracting trauma without care."
Matt Bernius Rachael Dietkus, LCSW Aditi Joshi Alba VillamilLearnings from Applying Trauma-Informed Principles to the Research Process
March 10, 2022
