 So how many of you attended the Unconference last night? Yes, thank you for putting it on. I unfortunately wasn't able to go, but I heard it was amazing. Oftentimes, a lot of talks make our way to the Unconference first and then make our way to the main stage. And I wanted to one give a special shout out to the people that put that on because it is a hard and thinkless task, but it means a lot to the community. So thank you. But also it's a it's a great segue into to my next guest because Denise originally suggested this for the open space conversation, but one of the things we started experimenting with our summit in Basel was bringing a lot more of those conversations front and center. There's opportunity to have them in sessions and in the unconferences, but we'd like to bring a lot more of them front stage as well. And so I wanted to really make space on the main stage on the first day to spend some time talking about empathy. And so I'm going to ask Denise, you senior software engineer at Pivotal and also the designer of that wonderful video that you saw. She wrote that all by hand to come on stage and join me to talk about empathy. Come on up Denise. And also one more like applause for Denise because she actually drew that whole video you saw by hand. Thank you. I continue to be amazed by that whole video. So I know a lot of people are going to be like why are they talking about empathy on main stage? Like this is a cloud conference, come on. But you know I couldn't think of anyone better than to have Denise join me to talk a little bit about empathy. It's something Denise spends a lot of time talking about and writing about. Has your piece posted yet on this? Yes. The new stack published an article that Caitlin helped me write called why empathy matters more than you think it does for open-source software. So if you're like I'm really curious about empathy look that up after this as well. But so Denise we spend a lot of time talking about empathy particularly in Agile. It comes up a lot, right? But I feel like it's a broad, vague term that means a lot of things to a lot of people and oftentimes I feel like it might be misused. So maybe you could walk us through what do you mean by empathy and how does that actually relate to why we're all here? Sure. So I think the classic definition of empathy is trying to see the world in someone else's shoes or from someone else's eyes. But I think that when it comes to practicing empathy as product developers, as contributors on product teams, I think it has a lot more to do with how you apply those insights rather than simply having a certain mindset. So in other words, I think that empathy is actually a set of verbs rather than a set of nouns. Like elaborate on that. Like let's talk through the verb side of this. Sure. So I think empathy is acknowledging that we all have a set of biases and beliefs about who our end users are, about who our collaborators are and being empathetic means leaving your office and maybe leaving your comfort zone and trying to validate or invalidate those beliefs. It means also maybe thinking about interviewing people, speaking to people who are not only current users of the things that you're doing, but also maybe people who have stopped using the product that you're building. I think a lot of the time we fall into a fallacy called survivorship bias. Why don't you like define that? I feel like it's something we use that in confirmation bias a lot. Maybe if you can help elaborate on what that means. Absolutely. Survivorship bias and confirmation bias are really similar. I think it's easiest to explain what it is through a quick story. So in World War II, a lot of planes were being shot down and the Allied Army started thinking what are some ways that we can reinforce our planes and make sure that more of our pilots come home. So they collected data. They looked at where planes are being shot. It was generally in the middle of the plane, the edges of the wings, and on the tail. And at first people thought all right that's where planes are being shot. Let's reinforce those parts. But then a statistician pointed out, hang on, those are the planes that are coming home. We don't need to reinforce those parts of the plane. We need to reinforce the parts on the planes that are getting shot down. So survivorship bias means only looking at the people who are still in your community who are still actively using the things that you're building rather than getting further into the field and trying to understand why it is that people might leave. That's actually really insightful. And I think that can be applied to both product and open source. And maybe we kind of explore them separately because I don't want to be overly broad brush with this. But as we, you know, we're at an open source conference. How do you think that relates to open source? I think when it comes to open source software development being empathetic can involve many different groups of people. So being empathetic can mean contributors being empathetic towards maintainers. Maintainers trying to see the eyes, see the perspective of contributors and maybe everyone trying to work a little bit harder to see the world through the eyes of new users and new and experienced end users. I think in practice this means trying to understand why it is that someone is making a feature request. Trying to make space to listen to everyone rather than those who just happen to be shouting the loudest. So not listening to the loudest voices in the room. Exactly. I know it's a it's a thing we have to all practice. It's really hard. Yes and open source in particular because that's tend to who we focus on are the people that are the most vocal or the most active on Slack or Twitter. And I think we need to figure out ways to make space for people that are a little quieter and maybe not as comfortable. Now translating that to an actual product standpoint and this I think she plays a role in your day-to-day current job as a developer. How do you apply that to product development? I think we apply it to product development by trying to make it clear that there are no stupid questions. Trying to make the new contributor experience as welcoming as possible and treating almost treating our relationship with the community like a product. I know that sounds kind of weird but it means you're you need to have some idea of what a productive working relationship looks like and identify steps towards iterating towards that. And do you often visualize what that looks like ahead of time or do you think it's a way that you kind of navigate there through conversation? I think it definitely is emergent. I think it would be very hard to define what that looks like ahead of time. But that could be one of the biases you apply if you're like okay I think I know how this is going to end. Yep absolutely. And not following along the path. One of the things that you know I really thought was powerful that you mentioned to me actually before we came on stage was you know how you design with empathy. If you can elaborate a little bit on that because I thought that was a really powerful way to think about design and the way we approach any of the products or the projects we work on. Yeah so designing with empathy is actually something that the product community and the design community have been thinking about for a really really long time. I've recently spent some time learning about what human-centered design is. Shout out to all the designers at Pivotal that have helped me learn about this. And I think essentially it's about centering the user and trying to figure out how the end user is likely to use their product. Not how you know the user is meant to use your product. So I'll give a I'll give an example of actually applying human-centered design towards a real-world scenario. So Ellie Arrera and Allie Blanken are two are a product manager and designer at Pivotal who have recently started applying human-centered design towards non-technology related scenarios. So they've been working on an initiative where they try to improve public health outcomes in refugee camps. Oh and interestingly when they conducted interviews with the women and children in these camps around why you know what would it take for you to use the toilets of the Red Cross's building. They learned that when there is a big light near the toilets men congregated around them and it made it unsafe for women and children to use them at night. So that's an example of an insight that you can't get without getting out there into the field and conducting one-to-one interviews and of course putting in the work to make sure that people feel psychologically safe enough to tell you these things. Yeah because on paper that sounds super logical. Well of course we would put a light in front of it but it actually acts in the opposite way. So that's really that's a fascinating way of thinking about it. I do want to end on the other note you said don't let me forget to say this but I do think it's important we've been talking a lot about digital transformation we've been talking about how the culture changed and the power around that but I really wanted to end on your point you really wanted to make about empathy and how it's no longer an option. Yeah so there are lots of different ways to get to the same end goal today. Whether users adopt your product and continue to use your product is going to be down to whether they can actually use it effectively whether your product meets usability criteria so the only way to build towards that is to design with empathy and to get out there and talk to your end user constantly. So empathy is no longer a nice to have in business it's something that is critical for transforming the way that people interact with technology and your product. And your product. Which I think that's important piece. Well thank you so much for joining us here Denise I for one was excited to be able to talk about this on the main stage again I'm going to do a plug for your PC published with the new stack I thought it was a really really powerful analogy around how we can actually in real-world examples of how we can pull empathy into our everyday. So thank you so much for joining us Denise. Thank you so much Abby.