Empathy Exercises
A long time ago, I heard a delightful story — the first I remember hearing — about a Product leader conducting empathy exercises. Am I…
A long time ago, I heard a delightful story — the first I remember hearing on this subject — about a Product leader conducting empathy exercises. Am I remembering the details of this story wrong? Is the whole thing apocryphal? Maybe some of the people involved will appear in the comments and clear it up. There’s only one way to find out!
A person was hired to lead cloud transformation for a big software company. They found themselves in charge of redesigning this big company’s big website. This was a huge project. Dozens of executives were involved representing their teams of thousands of people.
This web site was awful. It was hard to find product information and even harder to make a purchase. Customers hated it, and anybody on the internet could tell you it needed to change. But this view was probably not shared by the dozen or so executives, many of whom had invested millions of dollars of their own budgets in it. So they were probably a little bit reluctant to accept the idea that it should be torn up and thrown away.
So this person, our hero, gathers the executives together in a conference room and has them do an exercise. They ask them take out a credit card from their pocket — as the story goes, they were required to use their own personal credit card, not the corporate AmEx, so that they might feel the pain more personally — and use it to make a purchase from the company’s web site.
According to the lore, the executives find the experience of trying to use their own money to buy something from the site to be so frustrating and so time-consuming that it galvanizes them to make the difficult changes necessary to lead the company into the future.
Did this exercise contribute to the transformation that followed — viewed by many as one of the most successful cloud rebirths of the modern era? If so, then the exercise — and our hero — may deserve partial credit for the creation of billions of dollars of market capitalization.
Or maybe this all a charming fiction. Perhaps we’ll never know.