Empathy: The Secret Weapon for Product Owners to Craft Exceptional Solutions

The term ‘product owner’ is often described as a ‘user/customer advocate’, and for good reason.

Product owners are professionals who spend time understanding their customers, identifying needs & wants, and figuring out how to steer their team to meet those needs.

Product owners concurrently serve as the bridge between the stakeholders and the Scrum team. It’s a role that places relationship management as one of its key functions.

Therefore, the attribute instrumental in building, maintaining, and strengthening relationships is the Product Owner’s ability to exhibit empathy.

Empathy is the innate ability to understand and share the feelings of another without going through the same situation.

It is about walking in someone else’s shoes and approaching a subject from that individual’s point of view. If a product owner lacks empathy, they will struggle to fully understand what the customer needs and the reasons that fuel those needs.

Without empathy and this higher level of customer understanding, it is likely the Product Owner will miss out on opportunities to improve their products and services.

In any engagement with customers, it’s important for Product Owners (and designers) to take time before they start working together so that they can better understand their needs as users.

It’s why UI/UX designers perform user interviews and testing, whether it’s for a new website or a product. It’s also why user interviews are integral in the Lean Startup process and core to a Design Sprint.

Performing this properly requires both formal and informal research methods such as user observation, interviews, or usability tests. Once this research has been conducted, you’ll be better equipped to create something that meets those needs.

And you can only meet those needs if you understand them first.

Empathy is the most important skill a Product Owner must have. It is, arguably, more valuable than any technical expertise or leadership qualities.

Why? Because empathy enables you to understand your customers and market, which leads to better products and outcomes for your team. It also enables you to understand the perspectives, needs and wants of the team and stakeholders to better manage expectations when working toward a customer-centric solution. A Product Owner must manage and oversee all of this.

If you want to be an effective Product Owner, here’s why empathy should be at the top of your list:

• Empathy helps you understand customers’ needs so that they can be met with the right solution
• Empathy helps you understand how people will use your product so that it works in their favour
• Understanding how people use products makes them easier to develop, which saves time and money while improving user experience (UX)
• The more highly developed UX is, the better chance there will be for return on investment (ROI). This means that users stay longer on websites/apps because they find them useful – which can translate into better sales

Skills can be taught but empathy is more complicated.

Unfortunately, a person with low empathy may not even realise this fact about themselves. They may notice how frequently they ruffle the wrong feathers or agitate people, but they lack the empathy to recognise it for what it is.

It’s akin to a chicken or egg situation. You require empathy to recognise when you are making people unhappy, but you can’t understand why those people are unhappy because you lack the empathy to understand that what you’re doing is making others unhappy.

Fortunately, it’s not a hopeless situation.

There are a few scientific ways to measure empathy. The most common is through the Empathy Quotient (EQ) test. These are 60 questions that will assess your EQ level in relation to scenarios involving people in different situations.

But the test is only a start. It’ll tell you your EQ rating, but you need to delve deeper to properly measure empathy.

There are numerous methods and tools put forth by renowned psychologists to measure empathy in different people. There’s the Empathetic Scale (Hogan,1969). There’s the Questionnaire Measure of Emotional Empathy (QMEE; Mehrabian & Epstein, 1972), the Autism Quotient (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright Skinner, et al., 2001) and more.

To fully understand and measure empathy on a scientific level, it may be necessary to immerse yourself in the above studies and perform the quizzes/tests preferably with a specialist.

But, most people, understandably, don’t have that kind of time. And when dealing with the busy professional, it’s imperative to start on a more manageable level.

In the interest of keeping things simple, we’ll look at renowned psychologist, Paul Ekman. Voted one of the 100 Most Influential people in the world by Time magazine, Ekman’s studies helped to categorise Empathy into three simple categories:

In addition to the above three categories, when learning to become empathic, one should practice self-awareness and self-control.

Be mindful of how people react around you and the things you say to them that might cause those reactions. When you find yourself making too many uncomfortable comments or are told you are rude often, practice self-control when the next impulse comes.

You do this, because it’s about being a better, professional individual who can do the job well without hurting the reputation of the company and more importantly, your own reputation.

Furthermore, practicing good habits will bleed into your personal life.

Unquestioningly, there is a lot of debate about what empathy is and how important it is for Product Owners.

The answer is simple: empathy is the most important skill that a Product Owner must have.

It’s not just about being nice but also, understanding others. It’s about listening and being able to put yourself in another person’s shoes to create bespoke, usable solutions for them to make their lives better.

We hope that you’ve learned more about empathy and the importance of it in your professional and personal life. No one can really escape the need to be an empathic individual, Product Owners no less.

If you’re not, there are ways to resolve this, both scientifically and naturally. Both requires your commitment and willingness to review yourself with honesty to make meaningful changes.

This is very important because as we discussed, a person who lacks empathy may not even know. But there are tell-tale signs to be aware of.

You may lack empathy if you:

• Are extremely critical of people
• Blame others or the situation rather than take responsibility of your own actions
• Find it hard to forgive and move on
• Make offensive comments, but accuse others of being sensitive when they get offended
• Pursue your own agenda and ignore the opinions and perspectives of your teammates
• Are disinterested in the lives of the people around you if it doesn’t benefit you
• Don’t think about how your actions affect others

While not an exhaustive list, it should provide ample triggers if you find some resonance with them.

Sometimes, you might have empathy but fail to exhibit it within a certain situation. It’s part of being human: we are defined by our emotions and ability to handle those emotions at that point of time.

The important thing is that you try to be better. Especially, when you’re a Product Owner, then empathy and objectivity are necessary bedfellows.

So, when people say that being a Product Owner is a hard job, they’re right. But if empathy isn’t in your toolkit, then the job is harder than it needs to be.