Breaking Barriers with Empathy
Summary
Empathy sticks with you. Applying empathy as a product designer will help keep your customers at the forefront of product design. Ross Smith is the Director of Engineering at Microsoft, and he discusses how he uses stories to engender empathy.
Key Insights
-
•
Empathy is crucial for embedding customer focus throughout product development and breaks down organizational silos vertically and horizontally.
-
•
Storytelling is a powerful tool for building empathy that sticks with employees across all roles and disciplines.
-
•
Customer stories, like Chris Hurd’s toy giraffe or Lego’s replacement minifigure, emotionally connect product teams to real user experiences.
-
•
Strong product telemetry and customer feedback data must supplement stories to provide representative and actionable insights.
-
•
Direct engagement with customers through communities, social media listening, and ride-alongs helps surface nuanced issues and user needs.
-
•
Building empathy maps across thinking, feeling, hearing, and seeing encourages multidimensional understanding of customer experience.
-
•
Dogfooding with multiple user rings—from daily internal users to external insiders—boosts practical empathy and early issue detection.
-
•
Celebrating empathy-driven successes publicly within the organization promotes a culture valuing customer-centric approaches.
-
•
Monitoring product perception via news aggregators and app store reviews reveals unexpected creative uses and real user sentiment.
-
•
Empathy-driven product improvements support agile development by aligning multi-disciplinary teams with prioritized customer needs.
Notable Quotes
"Empathy sticks with you; if I tell you an inspirational story about what a customer has done, you’ll remember it."
"Joshi the toy giraffe resonated with everyone on the team at the Ritz-Carlton, from chefs to spa attendants."
"Stories are great and build empathy, but how representative are those stories of the broader customer base?"
"Product telemetry and customer data bring the stories to life in aggregate and help prioritize engineering focus."
"The Skype engineers spent time in the community chatting with users and made product changes based on those conversations."
"Sometimes assumptions break down, like credit cards without expiration dates in India; you have to listen carefully to customers."
"Building a customer empathy map with thinking, feeling, hearing, and seeing quadrants helps teams understand different perspectives."
"Using your own product frequently through dogfooding creates empathy about ease or difficulty of use."
"Encourage everyone in the organization to read customer feedback and use data science tools like sentiment analysis to understand it."
"Celebrate customer-driven successes so the whole organization learns what’s valued and aspires to do the same."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Designers need better training to work with off-the-shelf enterprise software like Sitecore, Salesforce, and SharePoint."
Alexandra SchmidtEnterprise UX Playbook
December 1, 2022
"The team is passionate, creative, and innovative, building experiences that people love."
Jen Crim Jess Quittner Saritha Kattekola Alex Karr Gurbani PahwaCulture, DIBS & Recruiting
June 11, 2021
"Product manager is not the CEO of the product and I don’t think that’s a very helpful metaphor."
Christian CrumlishAMA with Christian Crumlish, author of Product Management for UX People
March 24, 2022
"Maybe I too had joined another tech company that really wasn’t walking the walk when it came to diversity."
Libby MaurerTreating Diversity & Inclusion in Hiring as a Design Problem
December 5, 2019
"Technology is a tool, not a solution in itself; it needs human input."
Ali Jeffery Sheri ChudowHow DesignOps Helped Enable Wall Street to Work Remotely
October 22, 2020
"Daniel Day-Lewis went so far as to suffer three broken ribs immersing in his role for My Left Foot."
Daniel GloydDesigning From the Inside Out: How Method Acting Can Inspire Design Research
February 12, 2026
"Technology can revolutionize how we think about education."
Kristin SkinnerFive Years of DesignOps
September 29, 2021
"Design strategy focuses on providing a framework for developing design solutions that support a given product strategy, whereas product strategy addresses the business model, the roadmap, and prioritizing requirements - Frank Guo."
Johanna KollmannInsights-Driven Product Strategy: Get your Research to Count
December 6, 2022
"With QFI, we go upstream: simulate, model, predict user behavior before shipping, not just react after."
David SternbergUncovering the hidden forces shaping user behavior
July 17, 2025
