At our startup, it took real effort to get engineers to care about users. It was even harder in big tech.
It’s not just the job of “user research” or “customer support” or “the business side” to empathize & get to know our users.
To build great, actually effective products, it’s everyone’s job.
When we don’t feel the actual human on the other side, we fill in the gaps with our assumptions — which more often than not miss.
So now, I make an effort to make everyone in the company—especially our more introverted eng team—more grounded in customer truth.
Here’s what we’ve tried:
1/ We created a #customer-insights Slack channel
It’s not just sharing the love. We share hard feedback too—unedited and raw—so the team hears the real, real.
2/ We have a dedicated “customer insights” section during All Hands
We track customer support metrics & share these metrics with the rest of the team. We also share snippets of user tickets or conversations with everyone.
3/ We invite engineers to user research calls
Hearing a user say “this is so frustrating,” live and directly from them, hits different than reading a summary.
4/ We’ve had team members outside of customer support respond to tickets
Builds empathy for our customers, and for the customer support function too! 😆
5/ We reworked our product docs to be more user-driven
Not just “this feature will move X metric.” To explain why we’re building a thing, we put verbatim quotes from our users.
Always open to more ideas on how we can scale customer empathy better!
TAKEAWAY:
Customer empathy isn’t something you outsource to user research
It’s something you embed into your rituals, tools, and docs—so the whole team builds with sharper instinct.