 Hi, welcome to today's webinar. My name is Kirsten Vandetta. I am a senior product manager at LinkedIn And I'm excited to talk to you today about two of my favorite topics user empathy and Enterprise products. So a little bit about me before we get started I've been in product for about seven years now I started at a company called simple view which creates technology for destination management organizations and travel and tourism and They were a startup and I did that for a few years before moving into Higher education So I work with a great team at the University of Arizona to modernize The student experience and really create digital tools on campus and now I'm at LinkedIn which is a larger firm and Working specifically with building technology for sales as a senior product manager And most of my B2C experience really was in higher education And so a lot of my experience across from simple view to LinkedIn is in the enterprise space So when we talk about user empathy today that applies for regardless of what product you're in But when we talk about empathy in action, I will sprinkle some flavor on that When it comes to enterprise products, so the first section we'll talk about create how to create a culture of empathy Not only within yourself, but how you build up with your team and even up to leadership And then when we talk about empathy in action, we'll talk about how empathy is not just listening and understanding It's also doing and so what can we do to prioritize our user needs in enterprise products? And then the last thing just we'll talk about the effects of empathy Especially as you're building empathy within your team In fact, there was an article recently that came out in Forbes and it was talking about Satya Nadella the CEO of Microsoft And how he says there's one psychological trait the most innovative teams and that turns out to be empathy and so empathy can really create Innovation by truly understanding your users and putting yourself in their shoes. So that's what we'll talk about So let's start with creating a culture of empathy. Well first. What is empathy? What is user empathy? user empathy is Understanding something from your user's point of view from their perspective not yours So if you're listening to someone they're telling you a story about something and you're putting it in your own frame of reference that is Not empathy. Empathy would be listening to someone and actually putting yourself in their shoes why they may feel the way They do, you know, their goals. Why are their goals that way? What do they need to do to accomplish their goals? What are their pain points? What are the struggles that they're dealing with and understanding them coming from a perspective of understanding them instead of judging them? And so that is user empathy Walking a mile in someone else's shoes really so how do we build empathy for ourselves for our teams? Well, I'll start with just in general how you can be empathetic And then we'll talk about how to build empathy in our teams and then with our leadership teams and our internal stakeholders for our users specifically so First thing listen listen listen If you're not listening and you're doing more talking than they are you're going to miss something About their pain points their motivations and anything you need in order for you to truly understand What problems need to be solved because at the end of the day product is about finding the right problems to solve, right? And really understanding those problems And another thing I just put this as a some bullet I think it's really important to allow for silence When you are being empathetic and you're really trying to understand someone if you are Not prepared to sit in some silence while they process and you process You might miss something and our knee jerk reaction might be to fill the silence with our own perspective So an example of that might be if somebody says well, it's really frustrating for me because X And you say can you tell me a little bit more about that and they pause and you you know Maybe you're counting like 10 seconds 15 seconds. I mean, that's a long time actually sitting in silence And then you respond with is it because would it help it? Now you've switched roles Now you're talking about your perspective You're truly trying to be helpful, but you're not listening to them anymore You know put yourself in the situation and it's not about right so Allow for that silence, you know, if it's too long, you know, maybe that 20 seconds, you know jump in there But allow for that and during those silent moments process put yourself in their shoes, you know Instead of thinking to yourself well, why wouldn't they just do it this way think okay, so if I was them I'm doing it this way because and that leads you to better questions To be more curious and ask the right questions and again, don't ask those with prompts Would it work better if and definitely don't solution when you're being when you're just being an empathetic ear Definitely don't solution. You're still listening to them and it's still about them and not what you can do for them yet The next thing is speak their language, so it's really easy We're all you know, we were as product managers. We work with engineering. We work with UX We work with leadership work in the industry and there's a lot of jargon floating around Leave your jargon at the door Unless it's jargon that your users use don't use it use their jargon learn their industry terms Work to understand where they're coming from and use words that they identify with versus what you identify with The last two kind of go together Using empathetic language and avoiding judgmental language and in order to avoid judgmental language You have to avoid thinking judgmentally. So let's let's do an example of what that might look like So we have a user who says I would like to accomplish task X in fewer steps It's super frustrating too many clicks. Okay, so a judgmental language and judgment looks like Well, that doesn't you know why I mean, it's not that hard Just few clicks Then they're done so that's pretty common probably in any product forget enterprise I like that's pretty common in any product and Where that judgmental language comes in you've lost your empathy You've already decided they're lazy It's not that much and they're being sort of way So your judgmental language is nowhere close to empathetic Empathetic language flips the script and we think to ourselves. I wonder why it's frustrating for them. How many clicks is it? What are they trying to accomplish or could they do it? You know, I guess not could they do it a different way? But you know, how frequent are they doing that because that would be really frustrating if they're doing like, you know This many times a day, you know, we could look at that Now you're using empathetic language. I understand that that it's frustrating I could see how that would be frustrating Especially if it's this many times. So the difference is Judgy not judgy, right? But the difference is you're really trying to put yourself in their shoes Even when your knee jerk reaction might be that as ridiculous. It's seriously is a couple clicks. We have other things to deal with and That can be helpful, especially if you're in a setting with your users where you're talking to them, you know Not having that judgy language where they come with something to you and you immediately Solution for them and basically tell them like they're doing it all wrong. You can do it this way everybody else is Another way to build empathy within your team is with your personas and your user stories now personas. I'm going to say broadly Lots of people build personas depending on the size of the company you're in and what roles you have in your product team So if you're in a large company, it might be you wax that builds personas. It could even be product marketing If you're in a smaller company, it could be you as the product manager Regardless of where those come from use them as much as you can because it puts a face to a name in the bowl The second thing is is using user stories as a way to build in an empathetic language So not just you and anyone you're talking to is is taking in those stories from the user perspective But you're getting that into anything anybody's reading, you know, engineering is gonna read it Scrum master is gonna read it everybody that's working in JIRA basically is gonna read it or your spreadsheet or whatever you're using So our example is on the left. We have faceless dude Who wants to export data because he's gonna manipulate some data offline from other reports? Well, your knee jerk reaction probably is no stop exporting stuff. What do you mean the reporting tool? But skip that On the other side we have as a data analyst So we have a we have a persona I need to apply custom calculations monthly board reports We need this because we we should exist to our board In our community so we can keep our funding the difference is no persona versus a persona I haven't generalized why and Nothing for my engineering team to even tie themselves to they there's nothing for them to connect to Why are they taking data out of the system? We have a reporting tool Whereas the other one they can empathize they kind of see what's happening. Okay monthly board reports, you know The solution is not anywhere in here. It's just I have something to connect to I have someone to connect it to and Clearly the product manager has done a little more investigation to if I know enough to put that much detail in there So that helps using your empathetic language in your user stories The second thing Actually, I don't know what number one But the next thing is that sharing user feedback with your team is super important You can also share it with leadership. You can share it up. You can share it out But definitely with your team Specifically UX and engineering. I feel like get forgotten a lot and I speak from experience So when you get positive feedback something whether it's from a stakeholder a buyer a user or whatever that might be Share it share it share it share it. They built it. They're building the tool. They're maintaining the solution They were the ones that that really innovated and tried to think of the solution along with your expert problem definition and your why But it helps them connect with users more. Let's say they worked with your product champions Or your user group or something and now that it's rolled out and users are using it and they're blown away. I mean Man, you know for your engineering team to be able to say, oh my gosh, I worked with Julia on that and she loves it Like this is so cool On the reverse side, don't protect your team from negative feedback Now I put a like a tiny caveat on that in that We want to share we want to make sure our teams are hearing what's important to our users but if you get something that's just like you know Really negative language Make sure that when you forward that on that you are Adding narrative somehow to say what the negative impact is versus the negative language Ignore the negative language and look deeper again in their shoes What is the actual pain point and problem they're bringing up and that can really help your team connect To your users both positive and negative. So you got to share the negative feedback It's how you get to the positive feedback The next thing is actually four things. These are not small things. So it's kind of funny that I put them all in one slide So you'll see a little disclaimer at the bottom once you get these slides if you want to download load them You're welcome to read that But basically these are really big things. They take a lot of management time From you From whoever else on your team might be helping with these but they are invaluable Ways to create feedback loops and connect your team to your users in order to build that empathy So the first one's a user advisory group Call it whatever you want a user group a focus focus group But are really a group of maybe product champions or product users that you get together And they partner with you on really digging in with how they work And what they need and what their goals are And bringing your team to meetings with this group Make sure your team is embedded in these conversations your team UX Engineering whoever else is on your team They're going to hear different things than you do in those meetings And you all coming out of those meetings with those different perspectives Gives you just such a leg up when you go to create solutions Yeah, and you can be really innovative because you truly understand What's going on with your users the next thing is Sprint demos i put sprint slash feature demos, but it's really sprint demos So if you have this probably works better with a smaller company, but if you have Say your user group or your user advisory group or you have some product champions that are helping you With building a specific feature set invite them to the sprint reviews where your team is demoing what they've built Because not only does it help them give immediate feedback, but you start to build empathy both ways They see all the effort your team is putting in they see how the progress is coming along And they can give you feedback But also understanding where you're coming from and then also engineering can hear immediately like oh I thought that was going to include this or oh my gosh I can't even oh we asked for this and you gave us this and this is amazing and I can't wait to use it It was really a really important piece I found in In connecting my team to users And we got that idea from a fabulous agile coach. So if you watch this, I hope he knows who he is for feedback sessions What I mean by that is really I mean it really is a focus group But invite your team to those and so you're probably thinking right now like wow That sounds like a lot of meetings Kirsten and engineering is kind of busy. Um, you know, we only have so many resources pool Calling your engineers resources first of all is not empathetic So your engineers are not resources. They can be resources to accounting and finance to you. They're your team and Yes, you want to honor their time you want them to be able to do the work that they need to do But they're going to do better work If they connect with users So It doesn't have to be a weekly thing a daily thing whatever happen come quarterly Even but give them that time to connect ask the questions that they have It makes you guys all Work together in the same way coming from the same perspective or sorry bringing your different perspectives to build this just really excellent massive transform um And then the last thing is surveys surveys are a science be careful with surveys those can be built wrong They can be interpreted wrong make sure you And keep those Maybe hire someone to help you build your surveys first to start Um, but surveys don't have to be long either. They can be short. They can be in application. They can be for a specific feature um But surveys give you the quantitative data in some cases So you'll get your analytics from your product You'll look at your usage your daily active users Whatever that might be and your surveys help sprinkle a little more qualitative on top of that as well So quick breath here Um Before we move into the next section. I just want to do a quick check empathy Is so important Like satya said, it's important for innovation. It's important for really understanding your users But it is a method of understanding and connecting It is not a method of agreeing with or committing to You can put yourself in the shoes of somebody who You know has opposing views than you without agreeing with their opposing views Right to be empathetic is to understand from someone else's perspective So I just want to make sure everybody knows in no way shape or form am I saying Go through all of your backlog be super sad about all the collects have lots of sympathy For your users and make sure everything that they're bummed about gets on the road map. That's sympathy Empathizing is understanding and you can empathize without putting it on the roadmap So our next thing is how do we build user empathy with leadership and our internal stakeholders now? Some of our internal stakeholders might interact with users a lot For example, the sales team Or the support team they interact with users a lot So they're going to have a lot of user empathy already But leadership might not in the and the users that leadership is interacting with might actually be more like buyers And stakeholders and so that connection is missing and you are the missing link So how do you do that? How do you build user empathy? How do you go into a conversation and say yes? CEO or vp a product or whatever that might be You know that sounds like a great idea that solution and that initiative But here's what I could say about These last few meetings we've had with the user group here are the problems that they're up against Here's how we could we think we could solve that Yeah, and here's impact to us and it really helps when you bring empathetic language The wise the background the impact it kind of put a face to a name And so for four things here and actually the last one telling a compelling story is just a given It's down all of them The first one is having a roadmap that outlines your problems that you're solving and not your features that you're building Not all of us have the luxury of doing that. It's really hard for people to move to a bar on your roadmap that says Reduce manual data entry or save users time with blah blah blah, right? Um It can be kind of tough because people want something a little more tangible and so we end up with future roadmaps They're not perfect We end up with them But if you can move If you can move your roadmap to problems to solve versus features to build you get away from a lot of things like you know not having Conversations about why that one feature isn't out yet, you know You get to leave your engineering team room to actually innovate and create solutions without pigeonholing them Already on the roadmap and not leaving them a lot of room to change The next thing is communicating user impact and value often often often So everything that you had in your user stories make sure when you're having meetings you're talking about the why's You're putting your sharing user feedback. You're making your users real And from their perspective you are them in all of your meetings. You are the user advocate You are fighting for your users like tron And so you want to communicate that often The next one is communicating user value to business impact when you're prioritizing I'm going to show you what I mean by that when we go through the empathy and action I'm going to give you sort of a A roadmap or a path to how you do that So let's move into empathy and action Empathy and action to me is I have listened. I have heard I understand you um I understand why you need these things Now, how do I decide which of those things to act on and how do I make sure that we actually get some of the User needs onto the roadmap when I have all of these different competing priorities So I want to start with by saying that enterprise products Have a lot of stakeholders. Um, if you're already an enterprise product manager, you're chuckling right now because you know that Um, but you have your users you have buyers. You have internal stakeholders that range from senior leaders to product leadership to You know engineering has tech debt and it needs us to run some updates and dev ops has these other things and There's a lot of competing priorities and there's only so much room on the roadmap And again, don't call your engineers resources. And so when you're looking at well, how do I prioritize All this user feedback I got When you don't when you do all this stuff like I am listening we're listening And then you get to a point eventually where your users are like, but I feel like you're not Because I still don't have that thing you still haven't solved this problem for me And I just saw that you pushed out like nine new features. So where's my stuff, right? We have to be really careful about that because Um, eventually we lose their trust And they just stop talking and then we lose our ability to innovate. So we have to be really careful with that So how does that work? Well? I'm stealing the slide from a previous webinar. I did called b2b enterprise product leadership Actually, I sold the last one too This one just is in general If if you're new to product management, there's a lot of things you have to look at besides How do you put yourself in someone else's shoes? Because if they're reporting a problem or a pain point You need to know how many of those personas are impacted or what work streams are impacted Do they have a work around does it have to be solved? Or is it a nice to have are they just dreaming one day when they submitted that? So I'm binomium saying you don't have to do these anymore you do But when we're looking at empathy and action When we're trying to prioritize our user needs with empathy It looks a little something like this like how we go from empathy to on the roadmap So let's do our university edition So I have an advisor a student and I have faculty Our advisor I mean, so if you've been to to college or university your advisor helps you with your classes They help you pick your degrees. They'll help you with all sorts of things You as a student you need help navigating the university. How do I sign up for classes? You know, what happens if I'm failing one etc, etc And then we have faculty they teach students and they coach them in their coursework So if we look at let's say we have these things reported to us or we're noticing these things on campus So advisors are saying while students are dropping into my office all the time But I'm not available. I'm already booked I have people in my office on the phone whatever that might be And I feel really bad because I can't help them when they need it Then you have the student saying well, I need help and I go to my advisor But they're never available and I have to get registered and I just don't think I'm doing really well in this class And then you have faculty that are like I have office hours and no one comes to see me Right and I can see who's struggling in my class So we have a theme here and I've just picked this theme. You could probably pick other themes Well, let's say we want to connect students to help with the university So we take that theme And in our next evaluation We now have to align it to goals and we're going to align it to their goals We're going to align it to our goals and then we're going to develop a problem to solve Not a solution a problem to solve So the advisor's goal is to retain students and help them be successful The student wants to graduate She went from shocked to very happy the student wants to graduate And then the faculty obviously want to educate and help students pass their class because They want to keep their jobs because they want tenure So they want people to pass their class, right? So we have where this theme comes together Everybody kind of has a similar goal, right? We all want the students to graduate It's just different avenues for that But we have this underlying theme of needing to connect students to help and the right help So the university has a goal. Let's say they want to increase retention rates by x percent And so I can align their three complaints or pain points To their goals and our goal with this theme And create a problem to solve that says we need to reduce the friction and error For students when they're trying to connect with advisors and faculty for course help, right? So we get a very narrow problem that we can solve you could leave it more broad, you know Not necessarily course help could be other things But this is how you align it and you end up putting that on your roadmap with something like This where you are tying in the impact and value to your users To their companies their business To your business and your overall product vision And you align that all together with really empathetic language and that sounds something like this When students struggle to connect with help at the university they are x percent more likely not to return next semester Not empathetic just stated fact we have the data Empathy each semester they have several courses with multiple instructors Office hours to memorize several different applications to use depending on the instructor or college Lions to wait in or outside an advisory store And confusion and figure out who can help them best So one of our key business goals is to increase retention rates by x percent By introducing a solution that reduces friction for students and getting help with advisors and faculty We think this is going to help with our retention rates and you could have some more data in there And you might even be far enough along where you can say You know, we believe that the solution is an app You know, whatever that might be Because that aligns with your business vision because you're an app company, let's say So this is how you bring it all together when you dig in with empathy You get this opportunity To really build trust with your users to really understand them so that you you're solving the problem Because you understand it really really well And your team understands it and when you all come together, you all have a perspective That lends itself to innovating far better I mean, I think in that article that that Forbes came out with Satya's note about empathy being a driver of innovation He talks about teams the most high performing teams are the empathetic ones And the reason for that is it also helps you better align internally with your team So the effects of having empathy the effects of building empathy within your organization and within your team And the effect of building empathy with your at least your user group by inviting them into your space Say in like a sprint review You build trust Your users are going to trust that you listen that you're really going to try to understand them and you're going to do something about it Not about everything but do something about the things that are most important about align It's a whole different conversation about how to tell people you understand, but that's not going on the roadmap It helps your users build a sense of belonging they feel heard they feel connected to you They, you know, um, I've had such good experiences with the user groups And focus groups and bringing my team into it I just can't tell you how how well it just unites everyone And it creates this really transparent open place where we're all really trying To understand each other whether it's our users or cells or leadership It's it it's an incredibly useful thing to have on your team It's going to help you tell a better story. So having a user story like the one that I had early on in our example I mean by the time somebody gets to that Product education or change management can see oh, okay. I can see why we built that What's the solution so I can document it marketing can see why we were trying to solve that thing And what the impact is and you have a better starting point for a conversation than We added an export. Well, why how do I communicate that value? I don't understand what that value is right to you start from a better foundation And like I said, you know high performing and innovative teams better collaboration inside And then you turn your users into brand champions you turn your users into product champions And that word of mouth matters Especially in enterprise products when people are thinking about making large purchases for their organizations Sometimes products that aren't easy to get out of it's you know, it's it's not A one-way door, but it doesn't feel like a two-way door necessarily that you could easily go in and come back out change your mind So I hope you've enjoyed my experience with empathy the things that I've seen work in building empathy with teams And I've been lucky enough to be on several high performing Innovative teams with lots of empathy where we really just connect with our users and Understand where they're coming from and why they need things and I think it helps A lot with making sure that we're getting the right solutions out there. So I want to say thank you Thank you so much. Um, if you have any questions feel free to connect with me on linkedin. Just look up cursing man data It's also on the first slide and we'll make those available. Thank you so much