Can You Tell If Your Empathy Is Actually Narcissism?

Finding the True Voice of Your Customer

Despite all the formulas and jargon, lean products and startups follow a simple equation: validate that people would buy a certain something from you.

The process is straight-forward: get to know what customers need, build some of it, ask them if that’s the one, use the feedback to modify and build more of it, rinse and repeat.

At every step you have to ask yourself if what you’re doing would make the customers buy your product. With time, technology, practice and the accumulation of data, you’d find yourself internalizing and simulating your customer’s thinking process about your product. Like a method actor in a film.

That’s what we mean by ‘empathy’ in lean environments — simulating the thinking process of the customer in order to anticipate their decisions.

Empathy is the first layer of validation that product teams and startups have.

It helps them filter out a huge bulk of irrelevant ideas and features before committing resources to building or testing them. It is a guiding force on the ground in lean product environments.

But be it through personas or design thinking, empathy is still a highly subjective process prone to chance. You could very well employ empathy in a way that results in a thinking pattern that is completely different from that of a competitor team, or from another member of your very team, and all of them might differ from that of the customer’s.

Eventually, the team leader ends up forcing everyone to accept one variation of this thinking pattern and be happy about it. And since there is only one version, then it must be ‘the truth’. A pretty elegant way to delude ourselves with our own hands.

You’ve surely seen it hundreds of times, and I’ve seen my share, when team members start incorporating themselves into the narrative, and feel good about the “alive feel to it”. Slowly, your personas morph into ‘your boss’, or your neighbor, or worse yet into stereotypes instead of real people.

When everything is subjective, and there is no yardstick that we can use to measure, it’s easy to fall prey to using ourselves as standard.

But no matter how confident you might be about your process, you’d always be measuring something that isn’t real.

And you can’t control what you can’t measure in reality. You’d just wait and see how the customer reacts to your results today like you did the first day, and still pat yourself on the back that your process is learning, even if what it’s learning is mostly noise.

Let’s tackle these two problems.

First, let’s understand the motive behind our need for empathy in business.

In its general sense, empathy is defined as “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes”, which in practice is to imagine yourself going through the same circumstances as that person in front of you, and then out of understanding, consideration and pity toward yourself in that situation, you’d make decisions which benefit that person.

It’s an act of generous narcissism: how would you feel if “you” were in a certain situation X, and how should you act now to make that feeling less painful for that imaginary “you”.

Even though the other person may benefit from it, in reality, there is no trace of that “other person” in your formula at all. It’s all about “you”.

This is the trap into which product teams and businesses that employ empathy to no avail usually fall. In lean products and startups, empathy is used to make sure that the customer would buy the product that you’ll make. If, at any point, you fell into the trap of generous narcissism, you’d lose the voice of your customer.

That should be your true motive then. Not “putting yourself in the customer’s shoes”, but “to make way for the voice of the customer to come through”.

If you worked with marketing or product teams, you’ve probably seen persona profile design meetings where the group is asked to imagine a day in a persona’s life in order to “be familiar with the customer” and guess how the persona might make decisions.

The persona’s journey through the day is useful procedurally, i.e. when you try to come up with points of interest that can be used to mine needs and solutions. But it’s not as useful in simulating the thinking process of the customer.

Each decision a customer makes has many factors and facets to it, some of which may be situated outside the present (such as past memories and future aspirations) or even outside reality altogether (such as assumption, delusions, and fears). That’s what makes the “Journey through the Day” full of noise, and attributing a decision to a certain factor in it would only result in a biased estimation that “you” superimpose on the customer.

Empathy remains an important weapon in the toolkit of lean products and startups. But it only bears fruit when you bring yourself to think about your customer and your customer alone.

Stop building products for ‘your selves’. Remove yourself from the equation — all the people you know and all the crude generalizations that you might bring from your past.

Rely on data, customer interviews and feedback to find the voice of the customer, instead of disguising your own voice and waiting for random chance to serve you.

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