Deploy Empathy

A practical guide to interviewing customers

25 followers

A practical guide to interviewing customers

25 followers

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Customer support tools

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User research

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Books

Deploy Empathy will help you learn the skill of talking to your customers so that you can pull out their hidden needs, desires, and processes. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to interview customers and potential customers with confidence.

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Hi Michelle, congratulations on the launch! I have a question: When a book like The Mom Test exists why did you write deploy empathy & how is it different?

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5yr ago

Geocodio

Maker

@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).

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5yr ago

@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

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5yr ago

Geocodio

Maker

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

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5yr ago

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

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5yr ago

@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!

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5yr ago

Hey @mjwhansen! This looks great. I want to buy, but I'm a little confused. 1. On the FAQs, it says the physical book is not available yet, but on Amazon it says in can be delivered in a couple of days. 2. What do you get from the course that you don't get in the paperback? Notion templates? It says on this page "What's inside the book?" https://learnetto.com/users/mich...

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5yr ago

Geocodio

Maker

@alexlpethick hi! Good catch on that. I used Learnetto for the pre-sale and it looks like some copy needs to be updated — I’ll fix that :) The Learnetto page is to get the PDF + Google Drive/Notion templates, Amazon for paperback and Kindle edition. (You can also get the audiobook pre-sale private podcast from the other Learnetto link.)

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5yr ago

@mjwhansen OK, cool. I'd recommend showing a preview image or talking a little bit more about the Google Drive / Notion templates. People will be intrigued, but right now I'm exactly sure what those are / look like. I'd prefer the paperback (preferred way to read) + templates, so I'm just providing you an window into my mind :)

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5yr ago

Geocodio

Maker

@alexlpethick that’s helpful to know, thank you! I do want to launch standalone templates at some point.

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5yr ago

Career Switch To Coding

Yay! Well done Michelle, so nice to see this here. If anyone doesn’t listen to Michelle’s podcast Software Social I have to ask: Do you even SaaS?

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5yr ago

Geocodio

Maker

@simon_barker1 haha thanks Simon! If folks want to listen they can find it at https://softwaresocial.dev/ :)

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5yr ago

Wizen Guides

Deploy Empathy is one of the best - no, scratch it- it is The Best - book on customer interviews I’ve ever read. If you’ve never done it before you’ll start running interviews like a pro right after gobbling up the pages in one breath. If you’ve done it - still read it. Might find out that you’ve tackled it at a wrong angle. Can’t sing the praise loud enough for this book. If it was for me, I’d add it to the must read list in every business school and MBA program instead of outdated HBR issues:)

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5yr ago

Geocodio

Maker

@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/...

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5yr ago

Geocodio

Maker

Hi everyone! I wrote this book in public as a newsletter and it's been wonderful to have so much support from the community. Please feel free to ask any questions you may have!

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5yr ago

I loved Michelle's essays on Twitter regarding customer interviews - they really resonated with me, and where we are at right now in our product and customer journey. I was an early purchaser of Deploy Empathy and I just wish work would calm down enough to give me time to read it and get to grips with her ideas in more detail.

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5yr ago

Geocodio

Maker

@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 :)

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5yr ago

Hey Michelle, congratulations on the launch🎉 Wishing you all the best today! PS: noticed that your website uses the default WordPress favicon, you might consider changing it👍

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5yr ago

Geocodio

Maker

@ralphjsmit good catch! thanks, just fixed :)

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5yr ago

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