Why should we care about our customers' feelings?

What It Covers

Michelle Hansen, cofounder of Geocodio and author of Deploy Empathy, explains how customer interviewing builds better products and businesses while developing empathy as a learnable skill that transforms professional and personal relationships.

Key Questions Answered

• •Empathy Definition for Business: Empathy means understanding how another person thinks and acknowledging their reasoning as valid even when different from your own perspective, without requiring agreement. This suspension of judgment enables complete understanding of customer experiences, from invoice workflows to product frustrations, creating actionable insights.
• •Team Velocity Through Direct Customer Contact: Bringing developers into customer interviews as silent observers eliminates lengthy explanations and data presentations. Teams become naturally aligned and motivated when they hear customer stories firsthand, transforming abstract requirements into concrete problems they understand viscerally and want to solve immediately.
• •Context Over Transactions: Asking what brought someone here today reveals the full fabric of their life connected to purchasing decisions. A laid-off worker starting a podcast represents different needs than someone building a business tool. Understanding this context determines which customers to serve and how to help them succeed.
• •Parasocial Connection as Business Asset: Sharing company journey publicly through podcasts or blogs creates empathetic customers who understand founder struggles and respond with patience during product issues. This bidirectional empathy makes customer conversations feel collaborative rather than transactional, generating more honest feedback and sustainable relationships.
• •Empathy as Retrofit Challenge: Companies integrating customer research from inception avoid the difficult process of retrofitting empathy into established organizations. Making customer conversations the default response to uncertainty builds institutional muscle where talking to users becomes automatic rather than requiring executive approval or special initiatives.