Kevin Donaldson

Creating great software products is hard.  At Balihoo, we have by no means got it nailed, which is part of the fun/frustration (these words are interchangeable) of startups and new product development.  How can you improve your ability to build great products? 

One way is to create a culture of customer empathy, which have talked about here.   The next logical question is then: HOW you do this?  Not everyone can, and will interact with customers, but its important to provide channels and incentives for all team members to walk in their shoes.  Here are some options:

• distribute summarized results of usability/user experience studies.  (I say 'summarized' because the detail can be overwhelming and will not be read)
• build customer persona's can be useful in making customers more real. 
• record live usability tests using screen capture tools
• record actual support calls and make them available
• have people other than the support team actually take support calls or listen in live
• go on customer site visits - live or even video taped and edited to give people a feel for 'customers in the real world'

When setting up options to help your organization be empathetic - you need to also consider balancing depth with breadth.  Depth being how close the team member gets to the actual experience of the customer and breadth being the level of understanding across all customers.  For instance. the closer the experience is to a live customer interaction, the more impactful and memorable it can be.  The downside is that it may not be representative of your broader customer base. 

The opposite is also true.  Disseminating summarized learning's can be great to communicate broad learning's about customers, but it has already went through an internal filter, and is therefor a lower fidelity connection to the end customer.  There is no right answer other than finding a balance between depth and breadth that works for your organization.

A second aspect to consider is that your people are busy, so even if you provide options for them to self education on your customers they may not do it.   You may need to create a framework to drive internal engagement.  For instance at one company I worked at there was a formal program called KIT (Keeping in touch).  Every person in the organization had to participate in one KIT event each month.  For example you could participate in a lunch session where some typical customer calls were recorded, played and the team discussed the customer experience and what opportunities were available to make it better.  These could be snippets from sales calls, support calls, user experience tests, with the primary intent to helping team members not only hear but engage in thinking as if they were in the customer's shoes.

What options have you tried.  What has worked and what has not worked?