Deploy Empathy

@shavin47 Great question, Shavin! The Mom Test is an excellent introduction to the concept of talking to customers. When I interviewed 30+ readers of the early draft, many of them cited it as being the lightbulb moment when they realized they could talk to people and get info back. The Mom Test is more geared towards the pre-launch/discovery phase, whereas Deploy Empathy speaks to other phases as well (such as stopping churn, getting more customers, and testing experiences to see why something isn't clicking). Rob Fitzpatrick, author of The Mom Test, has noted himself how my approach is a bit more structured since I include several sample scripts and templates in the book, but the methods are fundamentally in harmony with one another. I tend to think about the different books available on customer research on a scale of 1-10. Level 1 is the most beginner-friendly and Level 10 assumes the most prior background in user research. On that scale, I'd say The Mom Test is Level 1, Deploy Empathy is a 2, Cindy Alvarez's Lean Customer Development is a 4, The Jobs to Be Done Playbook is a 5, Steve Portigal's books are a 6, and Acting with Technology is a 10 (extremely academic).

@mjwhansen Thanks for this Michele. I've mainly dealt with discovery phase work, it's great to know that Deploy Empathy covers other facets of customer research in product development. I look forward to adding deploy empathy to my designer toolkit :D

@shavin47 yes! I think there’s space for multiple books on everyone’s shelf about customer research :)

@mjwhansen No such thing as too much empathy for the customer ;)

@shavin47 @mjwhansen Thanks for the book recommendations, and thank you for writing such a valuable tool for creators to understand how to engage their audiences!

@anab Thank you Ana! And thank you so much for the wonderful comics you made explaining the concepts of the book. I recommend people check them out—several readers remarked on how delightful and refreshingly different they are! https://www.getrevue.co/profile/...

@candosten yes, absolutely! Everyone, including developers, should be talking directly to customers. As you note, many companies insulate their developers from customers, to the company's detriment. Stripe is a notable exception to this, and every function is expected to talk to customers. I interviewed a PM at Stripe for the book and included a lot of examples on how they integrate everyone, developers included, into the customer research process. I've even been interviewed by their developers myself :)

@mjwhansen thank you for your answer! I definitely agree that every developer should interview customers. Thanks for including this in the book! Looking forward to give it a read! Congrats again :)

@candosten thanks!

@devan_sabaratnam thank you for your support Devan! It can be hard to find time to set aside for a bunch of interviews. I hope you’re able to practice the concepts in the meantime. Think of it not as a delay but as extra practice time :)

@dawn_veltri1 thank you Dawn!

@bhumi1102 thank you! It never would have made it this far without the support of Software Social listeners :)