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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Congrats on the launch Michele! One question: Many software engineers are not doing any customer interviews, especially if they are working in bigger companies. Do you think the book is still relevant? If yes, how? If no, how do you think engineers can get closer to customers so that they learn from them earlier?

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5yr ago

Geocodio

Maker

@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 :)

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5yr ago

@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 :)

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5yr ago

Geocodio

Maker

@candosten thanks!

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5yr ago

@candosten Strongly agree that engineers benefit from talking to customers directly.

One thing I'd add: the scary part for non-researchers is often not "should I talk to customers?" but "what if I ask the wrong questions and get misleading answers?"

That's where structured practice could help. Give people a safe place to make the common mistakes before they do it with real customers.

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3mo ago