Building products with empathy and insights

A product is a solution which meets consumer demand, and co-creates value for its users and creators. Building products or product management is the fulcrum of business transformations. A product can be a software solution, suite of business services, expertise of resources or human capital, tangibles or consumables, etc. But at the helm of it, product bridges the needs of consumers and creates value for the business that offers the solution or product to the market.

What goes into building a good product ? A lot of programs, guides and researches make various tools and techniques available for product management. If I take a step back and look at the why rather than the how, there are two golden rules which any product manager must follow - empathy and insights.

Is it practical to say applying empathy can build great products? Yes, more than we think. Empathy as a science has two basic forms - cognitive and emotional. Having cognitive empathy helps the product manager to think from the mind of the users, what are their needs, how can they go about consuming the products, how and where can the product be made available, the entire development and supply chain of product consumption comes from cognitive abilities to put yourself in the shoes of the consumer. Emotional empathy guides product managers through building the right teams, leading by example to finally deliver the product to execution. A business or leader thriving without empathy and passion for his work, is like a fish swimming in a bowl - captive by its limitations and nowhere far to go...

Now let us move to the other product management principle - insights. Big data, analytics are all serving the common purpose of insights and decision-making. I would again stress of why rather than the how. While we have a lot of techniques of how insights can be arrived - machine learning, NLP, algorithms, analytics, data-mining, there are many tools which exist to aid decision-making, but why are insights so important? We need to know why we are selling a product and to whom we are selling a product. Know Your customer now extends beyond the digital or biometric identifications of the customer. Knowing one's customer is all about customer's journey , his everyday life and needs, retro-fitting his needs to the product capacity , watching the evolution or conversion of customer, tracking the segments , geographies of customers, peak demand cycles, etc. The life cycle of a customer and retention lays the guiding principles of how the product should be maintained and scaled. We translate these insights into a better user experience in the consumption cycle.

Largely all principles converge to this two-pronged approach and they encompass a lot of behavioral and cognitive sciences which make a happy customer.

Case Study : As an application of this practice, let us do a small exercise to know the impact of empathy and insights into product building. List down what insights do you need to build a product that addresses the business problem as below. Also chart the customer journeys /features and functions of the product with empathizing on consumer needs.

Business Problem 1 : Located at the heart of a remote town/village, are small enterprise stores like kirana, standalone book shops etc. Due to COVID there are guidelines to manage not more than a crowd of 50 at the market place. Over-crowding at stores is not allowed as municipal workers demand people to go back home. While all the shops have maintained social distancing marks and put up boards and signs for wearing masks, they are seeing overcrowding at peak times. The conglomerate of shop-owners have a meeting to solve the problem, the customers are the same locality residents wanting to purchase for their everyday needs and off-the-shelf delivery apps like are not operating within that geographical location. They have can pool investments and hire the right resources to create a product that can propell their sales. Can you list how would you go about conducting a product creation for these customers if they hire you to build it for them? Please note, do not list funding, time management aspects in your case study. We need to focus on why and not how. Practice empathy and insights, to come up with a list of product features that would work. Most of all, be creative with no boundaries.