#HBRLive: Using Empathy to Develop Products People Adore

0:01Jon Kolko:This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self.

0:37Jon Kolko:What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes.

0:45Hi, everyone. Welcome to this HBR Live Google Hangout, using empathy to create products people love. I'm Jeff Keogh, Senior Editor at Harvard Business this review. We're here to talk about creating products people love. On the one hand, with new tech and digital capabilities, it seems like almost anything is possible in terms of tweaking user experience. On the other hand, this technology context has created a really pressurized environment where product development is about getting to the minimum viable product, failing fast so you can get to the next round and hopefully reach success quicker.

1:32But our guest today has a different idea and it involves some really distinctive ideas about design and about process. John Kolko is founder and director of the Austin Center for Design and vice president of consumer design at Blackboard Inc., a company focused on solving big problems and challenges in education and learning through technology and innovation. He's also the author of a terrific new book called Well Designed, How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love. Welcome John.

2:09Jon Kolko:Thank you. Happy to be here. Really quickly before we get started, I want to tell everyone that you can leave comments or questions in the Q &A box on the player as a comment on the event page or on Twitter with the hashtag HBR live. We'll be monitoring these so that we can make this conversation as interactive as possible. So first, John, when you talk to different companies, clients, customers, and users, what would you say is the biggest problem or challenge that you see when it comes to creating products? You know, it's an interesting question. It's actually a little bit surprising. The biggest problem seems to be actually shipping the product, getting the thing out the door at the end.

3:02Jon Kolko:And you wouldn't think that that would be problematic, but I think that there's a sense of sort of fear and uncertainty that comes when you get to the stage where you're about to unleash a new product into the world. And so many great products never see the light of day. I remember when I was a consultant at Frog Design, that was sort of one of the things we'd bemoan over and over was, you know, we'd work really hard on this thing and at the end, for a number of reasons, but usually because of fear the product would not make it to market. it. And I think that actually the fear comes from a lack of real belief in a story around why the product should exist.

3:43Jon Kolko:When you have religion and the thing you made, it's a lot easier to take that leap into that risky place where there is uncertainty. But if you don't have that scaffold to lean on, it's very easy to second and third guess yourself. Say more about religion. You say when you don't have religion, what do you mean by that? Yeah, I mean, so when you create an innovation, by definition, no one's ever seen it before, right? And so in many ways, you're talking and drawing and cajoling the idea into existence. And along those lines, everyone needs to believe in it so that they spend their time and energy and in many cases money on it.

4:27Jon Kolko:And so that religion is sort of having a having a sense of criteria that you can lean on and relate to to say, I actually think this is the right product at the right time for people. And I want to go all the way. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think, you know, a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the Web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome.

5:02Jon Kolko:Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. with launching it. And, you know, I've seen a lot of hand-waving around statistics and quant data in order to create that scaffold of realism, but I don't believe it. And increasingly, as I see people sort of second and third guess at those statistics, I actually think they're looking for something much more qualitative to believe in.

5:44Jon Kolko:And so one of the big drivers that we use in my world and the book you reference is this idea of empathy in order to create that story around why a product is useful and usable, why people will desire it, and why it should live in the world. Yeah, I think I definitely want to get to empathy, which is really at the center of of the book and of your way of thinking. But I also want to get to the context too, which is problematic. And I mentioned that on the lead-in where it seems like with all of the data that is available to us and with all of the technological capability that we have, it's created this kind of very pressurized environment where everything is emphasizing speed and failing fast and iterating over and over again.

6:51And that seems to be in tension with empathy. So how do you focus on empathy? How do you keep empathy at the core in this kind of context?

7:04Jon Kolko:You know, it's a really good point and it's a good question as well. There is sort of this pressure cooker which I think is driven by a lot of the startup scene in San Francisco or Boulder or New York that says, you know, release now. Like, they're already too late and there's this sense of urgency in getting the thing out. And I really actually think that that's a reaction to that same idea that I spoke of before, this fear where products never launch because people aren't sure. And so I think the intent is great there. That intention of get the product out quickly so that it gets out at all.

7:40Jon Kolko:What's problematic there is that the quality of all of the big E's, engagement, experience, and emotion tend to get lost in that drive to launch something quickly. Which means that you're going to be gathering data, test and measure is sort of the relentless I don't know, underscore of that lean movement, but the data is not related to how people feel. And if you look at all of the different products I think that are successful, that people love, that people integrate into their lifestyles, and that they really start to form an identity relationship with, those products resonate on, in some cases, an illogical level, right?

8:23Jon Kolko:They resonate in a much more emotional or heartfelt manner. And I don't think you get there through test and measure, test and measure. I do think you get there through engagement with people. And so this whole, like, leave the studio, you know, get out of the office thing that Lean preaches, I'm completely aligned with. But what you do when you leave the office is very, very different. Yeah, that's taking us in a nice direction. I want to get to one of the things that I love about your approach, and it's very much reflected in the book. It's one of the reasons why the idea of this book appealed to me so much is that it's very much built around a process, sort of design thinking, which I want to talk about a little bit more later too, your ideas on that.

9:15But around a process that has these four key steps, determine product market fit.

9:45Jon Kolko:Compatibility and availability varies 18+. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. Identify behavioral insights, sketch a product strategy, and polish the product details. So, you were starting to mention about sort of getting out of the office and getting out there and to me that sort of means getting out into the market. So can you say a little bit more about these steps and in particular that first step, the product market fit.

10:31What do you think about product market fit? How do you define the market?

10:35Jon Kolko:Yeah, so that's the starting point and really one and two are sort of intertwined. But the idea of product market fit is making a product at the right time, at the right cost, on the right technological platform, and so on and so forth. And I like to use an example to illustrate what happens when you miss. Google Glass is an interesting innovation. I think people love to talk about it. But it's definitively strange. We're not ready for a cyborg sort of approach of people wearing computers on their faces. And so the idea of it having mass adoption, product market fit is going to miss, not because the technology is not ready.

11:17Jon Kolko:It may be, it may not be. But because there's a social norm that we actually have to bridge of people being ready to sort of integrate that into normal. But I'll give you a hint of how we're getting there because I think it's naive to say it will never catch on. if you sort of back up about three years or four years it was new and novel to see people with Bluetooth headsets in their ear talking to themselves and that's a computer on your face now it's a little more normal. I wouldn't say people love it it's like oh who's that annoying guy talking on his Bluetooth headset but it's a little bit more socially acceptable and so we start to see this trail of signals of product adoption where technology becomes normalized And really the word is humanized, right?

12:02Jon Kolko:It becomes part of what it means to be a human or part of the human experience. And so to get the product market fit, sure, it's about having an innovation or an invention, it's about having great technology, but it's also about launching those things in line with that technological infrastructure where it makes sense. The other sort of side of this coin is launching at the right time for a government or a policy set of scaffolds. And we can see this playing out with ride sharing right now. Uber is my sort of quintessential example of watching big money, big players actually change policy, change the law in order to create product market fit because they have a wonderful product.

12:47Jon Kolko:I love using Uber. The experience is fantastic. The technology is really, really impressive, the scale at which they're able to operate. But if the laws are in the way, they can't run their business. and you can see smaller players go out of business, some smaller players struggling like Sidecar or Lyft but then you see the 30 ,000 pound gorilla Google investing this massive amount of money mostly to go lobby.

13:15That's a great point, thinking about the policy context, the structural context for the product and how important that is. another point on the market. You talk about sensing signals from the market. And in the book, you say we should develop and generate different kinds of artifacts around that. What do you mean by artifacts? What are the different kinds of artifacts?

13:43Jon Kolko:Yeah, it's interesting. When we talk about things, like many of us have meetings, right? We have meetings all day long, and we talk about things. And once you talk about things, they sort of disappear, right? They go into the ether and there's some, maybe there's some knowledge or comprehension. But for the most part, the idea is lost. And so many times we leave a meeting not knowing what we talked about. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.

14:19Jon Kolko:Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. Next time you have the meeting, you have the same meeting again, and it's pretty much a groundhog day going on. And when you make a thing, when you draw an artifact, when you create a diagram, a visual representation, it serves a couple purposes.

14:57Jon Kolko:One is it grounds that meeting in reality, right? It says, this actually happened and these are the things that we'll talk about at Determine. But another is it aids in something called sense making. Sense making is both a personal and a collaborative activity of forming new knowledge. And since it's a shared activity, if we create this diagram together, we can actually generate knowledge together so that we both now have sort of a view of what reality is and what it should be. And if we can create a visualization of these signals, of this product market bit of the conversation around that, then we can create alignment.

15:34Jon Kolko:And no matter if you work in a big company or a small company or a startup, that alignment is critical. It's critical to shipping products. if people aren't actually in lockstep and even more importantly sort of in philosophical lockstep the product's not going to succeed and so the types of artifacts we build are diagrams, a two by two a customer journey map a visualization of the sort of industry ecosystem, like it almost doesn't matter what the specific artifact is what matters is that you're drawing it together, it's visual and it's lasting it's actual, it's not theoretical Yeah, that's interesting.

16:16Another interesting element in the book that's a part of what you're saying is the role of visual thinking. And you mentioned this just now in creating different kinds of visualizations. Is there anything more to what you mean by visual thinking?

16:33Jon Kolko:Yeah, certainly. I mean, it's something that designers, architects, artists, whatever, have always sort of done because it's the way that they process. But increasingly, it's actually, I think, one of the only ways to manage the complexity of the constraints and systems that we're talking about. So let's use Uber as an example again. If you think about all the touch points that Uber has, even simplistically, they have an iOS app, they have an Android app, they have an iOS app for drivers, They have an Android app for drivers. They have a set of rules around cost, you know, dynamic cost and pricing.

17:11Jon Kolko:They have a number of different product features and functions. You can't keep that all in your head at once. And so a visualization of that, a diagrammatic representation of it, actually serves to solidify it. It becomes the product strategy in many ways. And so everything we do, both in my educational world as well as in my professional world, is visual. The entire office is covered in whiteboards and we constantly develop ideas and tear them back down, develop ideas and tear them back down. And you know that's challenging, it's challenging for a couple of reasons. We have a distributed team, we have people all over the world and so they obviously can't see those whiteboards, we have to sort of translate that.

17:52Jon Kolko:Whiteboards don't necessarily capture time, right, it's definitive, it sort of blends and abstracts the interaction that got there. But even in spite of all of that, it's our go-to method for thinking through complexity. And so at the heart of a lot of the types of problems that we're talking about are working through ambiguity, working through a muddy sort of sense of non-clarity in order to come to a crispness. That's what visual thinking does. Yeah, that touches on another point that struck me about your approach. When you talk about gathering signals from the market and sort of synthesizing and getting to behavioral insights about that, it made me think of...

18:45Jon Kolko:This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade Electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self what propels you propel with gatorade electrolytes big data uh there's been such a i mean we're flooded with with all kinds of data coming from all directions and it's very easy to get overwhelmed uh in sort of trying to filter and synthesize that, and it seems like visual thinking is also perhaps an effective lens for and way of trying to do that.

19:50Jon Kolko:Yeah, that's right. I mean, what you end up balancing is that once you actually get that product out the door is this mess of data, right? You're marinating in it, and it's like you can track everything a person does. And so we lean heavily on those market signals that we talked about as well as behavioral insights, which I assume we'll talk about soon, as sort of the vetting criteria for what of that behavioral data do we pay attention to and what is noise. Because if you think about it, even a simplistic product, let's say it does one thing, is just going to get a ton of data. You're going to find out about who uses it, how long do they use it, what features and functions do they use, what do they tap on, how long did they spend on each different page or section.

20:32Jon Kolko:and so you're sort of overwhelmed with this big data stuff and you can find it in specific and you can find it across different demographics and psychographics and so again we lean on this idea of market signals that idea of technological precedent as well as sort of political infrastructure and the behavioral insights that again we'll talk about soon in order to say which of this data is important to us which should we completely ignore and how do we ingest that data in order to inform future iterations of the product. Yeah, okay, so let's get to that. We've been putting it off long enough. How do you go from all of the signals and, you know, using visual thinking tools and how do you then get down and crystallize these behavioral insights, which I think are really at the core of your approach?

21:24Jon Kolko:Yeah, they are. I mean, to put a fine point on it, I think it's the most important part of the process. And, you know, if you have to cut everything else, if you still do this, there's some sort of magic that happens. A behavioral insight is a provocative statement of truth about human behavior. And so I'll sort of get into what that means. But the way we get there is through qualitative ethnographic research. What that means is we spend time with people and we watch them do things. And there's a subtle nuance there. Yeah, we ask them questions and we talk to them, but we're not doing an interview and we're not saying, would you buy this?

22:01Jon Kolko:And we're not asking them to sort of predict their behavior in the future. Instead, we're saying, what do you do right now? Let us see it. And so I can actually, I'll give you an example from my own world here at MyEDU and Blackboard because it's sort of present in my thinking. I was at a startup called MyEDU, which helps college students succeed in college and get a job. And that was acquired by Blackboard back in December. And at MyEDU, our focus was on students. And students are very strange. It's probably been a while since both of us were college students. And things have changed a great deal.

22:40Jon Kolko:Some things haven't changed, but things have changed a great deal. And so in order to understand, but better yet, in order to empathize with college students and get to behavioral insights. We spend time with them. We went in their dorm rooms, you know, with their permission, obviously. We looked through their bags. We watched them do their homework. We had them, you know, they registered for classes, and we observed that. We took tours of, you know, their closets and things like that. And through that, and we did this with, you know, these are three - and four-hour sessions with, you know, 20 or 30 college students.

23:11Jon Kolko:You really start to empathize with what it's like to be a college student. I can understand what it's like to be a college student very academically by reading papers about it, by learning about statistics, by remembering my own experience, but that doesn't get me to what it's emotionally like to be a college student right now. And what it is emotionally like to be a college student right now is highly anxiety-ridden. College students are full of anxiety around really three or four core decisions. They're filled with anxiety around what school do I go to? Do I pick the right school? And then the next decision is do I pick the right major?

23:50Jon Kolko:And there's full of anxiety around that. The sort of next decision in the path is what classes should I take? Am I taking the right classes? And then finally, what's my job? What's the great job I'm going to get? And a big part of this is that we've sort of ingrained this artificial, like, oh, that's the magic process. You know, it's this beautiful story of you go through college, you get a job, and you live happily ever after. And I'm not entirely sure that that's, you know, ever been true, but certainly not true now. And so college students are hooked with anxiety. Anxiety doesn't tell us exactly what to build, but that can become a behavioral insight.

24:26Jon Kolko:Because if we say students are anxiety-ridden, then our product should help them minimize anxiety. right and so now we have an emotional sort of set of requirements upon which we can start to build a product the utility can come from another a couple of different places right that's going to come from those market signals it's going to come from us saying what is the product we want to build and in our case we help college students present themselves in a linkedin style profile but highly visual and then we present it to college recruiters who want to hire them And so that's what it does, but the way it feels has to be highly emotional, and so it's aligned with this idea of minimizing anxiety.

25:06Jon Kolko:It's a provocative statement of truth to say college students are anxious, because we can go find examples of college students that aren't anxious. We're making a gross generalization based on some really rigorous but biased field work, but then we're going to build on top of that scaffold in order to produce great emotionally resonant products. Yeah, it sounds like the kind of closeness that you're talking about to get at that sort of emotional resonance is a kind of ethnography. I mean, it reminds me of sort of cultural anthropologists going out and studying different groups and kinds of people over long periods to get really deeply sort of into their mindset and their emotions.