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For Any Product to Be Successful, Empathy Is Key

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For Any Product to be Successful, Empathy Is Key * Jon Kolko
November 20, 2014

Meet Mary, a college student I met at a Texas state school. She’s a Junior, and she’s changed her major three times. She picked her first major because her mom told her to. She picked her most recent course of study because her best friend is doing it, too. Mary wants to travel the world when she graduates. She’s very aware of the amount her education is costing her family. She loves college, but she’s anxious about her future. She’s anxious about decisions. She’s anxious about everything.
Now imagine you’re designing a product to try to help Mary ease her anxieties. Based on this fairly typical profile of a college student, you can start to …show more content…

And that means we need to spend quality time with students and teachers. We’ve been in their dorm rooms, watched them watch TV, and learned about their anxiety around school. We’ve learned about how adjunct teachers juggle classes at four different schools yet know every student by name, and we’ve heard about how teachers fear punitive recourse as a result of discussing their distrust of their administration. These are experiential facts – that’s knowing. But more importantly, we’ve started to feel what it’s like to be a part of the college experience. The knowing helps us convince ourselves and our stakeholders that our products are financially sound, our strategy is rational, and our tactics will succeed. But the feeling drives every single product decision we’re making.
Empathy is the secret. And the catch-22 is that you can’t actually ever feel exactly what Mary feels, or the millions of other Marys, because Mary’s journey is her own. It’s based on the richness of her entire life experience, the baggage of her childhood, the norms instilled in her by her family, the town she grew up in. You might be able to know what Mary knows, but to really feel what she feels, you would have to become her – which, of course, you can’t do.
And so complete empathy is impossible, but the pursuit of empathy is not, and it’s this pursuit that can be methodically taught and learned. Empathy is a spectrum, with you on one side and Mary on the other. The closer you get to

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