Building Empathy In Engineering Through User-Centered Design

Your solution is technically perfect. But something’s missing.” I said those words in a packed review meeting at Amazon Connect. The architecture on screen was brilliant, optimized, scalable, elegant. But the business stakeholders weren’t nodding. They were checking their phones. And I saw it clearly: the translation gap. Our engineering lead had built a masterpiece for the builder’s eye. But for the people funding it, using it, championing it? It was a beautiful book written in a language they couldn’t read. I recognized the moment instantly, because I’d lived it before. At Microsoft, I once pitched a technically flawless design to execs. The tech crowd applauded. The business side passed. Not because it didn’t work, but because it didn’t resonate. That was the moment I realized: Technical excellence without human understanding is just noise to the people who need to act. So at Amazon, we did something radical. We stopped the review. We didn’t add more slides. We asked a different question: “How does this change the day-to-day life of, a contact center agent ?” The next architecture proposal started with her story. The system didn’t just reduce latency. It made her feel respected. Trusted. Heard. That changed everything. From then on, we embedded empathy into engineering: •Engineers shadowed real users before writing code. •Every design doc started with a human narrative. •We built “empathy metrics” right alongside performance metrics. This wasn’t soft skills. This was integration intelligence: the ability to make technical brilliance humanly meaningful. If you lead engineering in the AI era, remember: Your best solutions won’t win if they don’t translate. Build systems that resonate, not just operate. Learn more in my book Metashift - chapter 7 #TechLeadership #AI #MetaShift #EngineeringExcellence #HumanCenteredDesign

At our startup, it took real effort to get engineers to care about users. It was even harder in big tech. It’s not just the job of “user research” or “customer support” or “the business side” to empathize & get to know our users. To build great, actually effective products, it’s everyone’s job. When we don’t feel the actual human on the other side, we fill in the gaps with our assumptions — which more often than not miss. So now, I make an effort to make everyone in the company—especially our more introverted eng team—more grounded in customer truth. Here’s what we’ve tried: 1/ We created a "customer-insights" Slack channel It’s not just sharing the love. We share hard feedback too—unedited and raw—so the team hears the real real. 2/ We have a dedicated “customer insights” section during All Hands We track customer support metrics & share these metrics with the rest of the team. We also share screenshots of user tickets or conversations with everyone. 3/ We invite engineers to user research calls Hearing a user say “this is so frustrating,” live and directly from them, hits different than reading a summary. 4/ We’ve had team members outside of customer support respond to tickets Builds empathy for our customers, and for the customer support function too! 😆 5/ We reworked our product docs to be more user-driven Not just “this feature will move X metric.” To explain why we’re building a thing, we put verbatim quotes from our users. Always open to more ideas on how we can scale customer empathy better! TAKEAWAY: Customer empathy isn’t something you outsource to user research It’s something you embed into your rituals, tools, and docs—so the whole team builds with sharper instinct.

I've found empathy mapping most valuable during early project phases and presentations. Nothing convinces leadership to greenlight a project like showing them you truly understand your target audience's pain points. But, they're not for every situation. For straightforward projects with well-understood users, a quick check-in might be sufficient. The key is using empathy maps as tools for insight, not checkbox exercises. I've seen firsthand how they break down communication barriers between departments. The beauty of empathy mapping lies in its simplicity. The classic version has four quadrants – Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels — though I've found adding "Sees" and "Hears" can provide even more context for certain projects. What matters isn't the exact format but the conversations it sparks. Here's what works in my experience: - Start with a clear purpose. Are you trying to align your team around user needs? Inform a specific design decision? The goal shapes everything that follows. - Ground your map in reality. The most valuable maps come from actual user data – interviews, surveys, support tickets – not assumptions. I've watched teams realize how much they'd been projecting their own preferences onto users when confronted with real feedback. - Make it collaborative. Bring together people from different departments to fill out the map. The magic happens when your developer suddenly realizes why that feature the marketing team kept pushing for actually matters to users. - Keep it alive. The best empathy maps evolve as you learn more. I keep ours visible and revisit them regularly, especially when we're making crucial decisions.

We built fast systems. Somewhere along the way, we forgot to build kind ones. That’s why this simple Korean idea stayed with me. Before a call connects, the caller hears a small voice saying, “You’re about to talk to my mom.” Or my dad. Or my sister. And everything shifts. Not because callers become kinder people overnight. But because the system reminds them that the person answering is human too. It brought back a lesson I learned early in my career building financial products. If you design only for efficiency, you get compliance. If you design for humanity, you get trust. And trust is what makes systems scale. This Korean example is not customer service innovation. It is behaviour design. A tiny nudge that restores empathy in a space where it quietly disappeared. It made me think about how often we build products to optimise flow, not feeling. We fix the steps, but forget the state of the person going through them. We reduce friction, but overlook the fear, frustration or vulnerability underneath. A small tip for product leaders: If your system interacts with people at stressful or uncertain moments, your first job isn’t speed. It’s care. A sentence. A tone. A pause. A reminder that a human sits on the other side. Because most friction in modern life doesn’t come from systems failing. It comes from human connection thinning. We already know how to build fast. The next frontier is learning how to build kind. Not every solution needs a feature. Sometimes it needs a feeling. What would your product look like if empathy was part of the design spec?

Product Management and Design are customer-facing roles. Sometimes we find them treated as internal, working off information filtered through sales, marketing, or support. That channel of information isn’t bad—it’s essential. But when it’s the only channel, when customer understanding comes only secondhand, we unintentionally starve these teams of the very input they need to thrive. Product Managers build empathy by hearing pain points and opportunities firsthand. Designers uncover goals, mental models, and perspectives by being in the room with customers. This isn’t just about information—it’s about immersion. Direct exposure shapes better judgment, sharper priorities, and solutions that truly resonate. When PMs and Designers are empowered to be on the front lines, organizations shift from building on assumptions to creating with clarity. The result? Teams that not only deliver features, but drive meaningful change for the people they serve. As a designer/strategist/product person (whatever the hell I am these days), I believe it’s impossible to function effectively without regular customer access. It’s where awareness becomes understanding and empathy, and where understanding and empathy become impact.

SXSW London! This week I presented "Empathy is the source for all great design" to a full room (400 people turned away because no additional space-darn!). I was left with a feeling that many in the creative class are in a crisis of change, with concerns about trust, erosion of accepted norms of integrity, AI displacing employment and anxiety about a collapse of empathy. Well! 100 years ago (almost precisely), Louis Kalff (the first Global Head of Design for Philips) penned the title of my talk. There are 4 key tools that bridge the empathy gap: 1.   Direct observation – there is no substitute for seeing customer pain points right where they are. Don’t listen – WATCH. People are notoriously unreliable at telling you what’s wrong and what their pain points are. This is particularly true for hospital workflows. 2.   Work backwards from the customer - Answer these key 5 questions: Who is your customer? What is their pain point or need? What benefit will our solution bring them? How do we know we are right and was this validated? What does it looks like? SHOW me the prototype. As Dennis Boyle from IDEO told me years ago, Don’t schedule a meeting unless you have a prototype to show me. :) 3.   Co-Create DIRECTLY with your customers – Don’t outsource your strategy to an agency. Work directly with your customers and solve their problems together because every customer is different and you will fail early to succeed sooner. 4.   Psychological Safety – One of the things I learned from the design (spaghetti tower) challenge that I presented at TED in 2006 is that the highest performing group of all (kindergarteners), succeeded over the worst performing group of all (business school students). Why? The kinders don’t spend half their time arguing about who is going to be CEO of spaghetti corporation. They just build and learn faster. Thesis: Status transactions are the death of innovation and leaders need to serve their teams and leverage that quiet brilliance of the introverts. And as a closing message I shared one of the key lessons in my quest to unlock the creative potential of other people: Invest in putting others above yourself – you will be rewarded. There is no win and no fail. There is Only MAKE.

The best engineers I’ve met in my career all share one thing in common: they don’t talk about code. They talk about people. They want to understand the person on the other side: ↳ The claims adjuster who’s overwhelmed, ↳ The operations leader stuck with a 25-year-old system, ↳ The injured worker who just wants a fair, fast, human process. These engineers don’t start by asking: What tech stack are we using? They start by asking: Who are we building this for? and what problem are we trying to solve? Real technology doesn’t begin with requirements but with empathy. And that’s exactly why Terra’s technology works. ↳ Not because it’s cloud native. ↳ Not because it’s AI-native. ↳ Not because it integrates with everything. It works because 𝗶𝘁’𝘀 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲-𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁. Before we ever architect a system, we architect around the human experience. Every workflow, every automation, every integration starts the same way: How does this make someone’s life easier? In the end, empathy is our infrastructure. It’s the invisible architecture behind everything we build. Code can be fixed. Architecture can be redesigned. But culture, especially a culture built around humans, must be intentional from day one. Let's be honest! When was the last time you talked about people before you talked about product? I deeply believe this: Technology without empathy doesn’t work. It just executes. But technology built for humans, and because of humans, truly transforms. I would love to hear more about that! What do you value more on your team? 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘩𝘰𝘵𝘰 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦𝘯 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘺 𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘧𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘮𝘢𝘻𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘳𝘰𝘰𝘮: 𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘺 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘦 𝘣𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘥. #HumanFirst #Leadership #TechCulture #Innovation #Terra