Deploy Empathy
A practical guide to interviewing customers
Michele Hansen
Dotsquare Press
Copyright 2021 Michele Hansen.
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Damien Terwagne.
Scripts, templates, and phrasing may be used in customer conversations, emails, or other direct customer interactions without attribution. (For the purposes of this notice, customer refers to a person who currently, previously, or who could plausibly pay for or use a product or service.)
Any public or presentation contexts, such as posting to a blog, newsletter, podcast, talk, presentation, book, or other situations that are not direct customer interactions require attribution.
Using, adapting, and sharing the scripts within a company or consultant-client relationship is permitted and indeed encouraged. In the case of a consultant-client relationship, attribution is required.
I hate wasting time and writing code that never gets used. The only way I've found to truly avoid that when building my SaaS apps is to talk to the people I want to have as customers. Deploy Empathy takes the anxiety out of having these conversations so you can get honest thoughts about what you're trying to accomplish.
Michael Buckbee, Founder, Expedited Security
Deploy Empathy is an essential field guide for anyone working close to product and customers. The book is filled with practical advice on customer interviews with Michele's unique ability to not just explain the how but also the equally important why. Learning from her experience is like taking a master class in nurturing product insights out of potential and existing customers. There is truly something for everyone involved in the product lifecycle.
Josh Ho, Founder, Referral Rock
Over the last 15 years, Ive helped developers sell software and marketers to build software. Convincing them to talk to customers and really listen to customer problems has always been a challenge. Deploy Empathy is the instruction manual for customer interviews Ive always wanted. Finally, I can direct my clients to scripts and techniques they can use to learn more directly from their customers. Many of them would have saved months, some hundreds of thousands of pounds, had they applied the practices in this book.
Jonathan Markwell, Small SaaS Advisor, PlainScaling
Micheles expertise and knowledge in customer interviews have been instrumental in shaping the way we launch new products and features. Before reading Deploy Empathy, I thought I was pretty good at talking with our users and translating those conversations into useful features. After applying some of her interviewing techniques, the feedback has become so much richer and illuminating. It is helping to shape our long term strategic objectives, not just setting immediate goals.
Matthew Lehner, Co-Founder & CTO, OneFeather
Doing customer interviews right is an art. It takes practice and skill to think on your feet to ask the right questions. Michele nails it on her podcast, Software Social, and especially in this book. I'm a long-time believer in talking to customers, and now I feel I have the techniques to get the best results.
Rob Bazinet, Founder, Still River Software
If I can do this, you can.
Apparently, the first time I uploaded data to Geocodio was June 28, 2016, so that had to be the year I experienced my first customer interview with Michele. I wonked out on her about pulling in Census data. Now, Im the smallest of small-time users until now because my products didnt launch, but Im building my third one and it looks like this bird will fly.
So, who did I track down to follow and emulate? Michele Hansen of Geocodio. What did I find? Her advice on doing customer researcha task that always made me meltdown whenever I thought about it. Her advice helped me understand that Im actually excited to do customer research because I love talking about the problem with this product because I am receiving responses from people who actually feel the pain my product will relieve. Maybe one day Ill graduate to a gentle tone and simple questions, but until then Im looking forward to culling the information I learn while talking to them.
Andrea Brice, Technical Head and Founder of Willowfinch
In an ever-increasing automated world, Deploy Empathy is a humane, practical, and actionable manuscript, full of tools you can use right away to listen to your customers with empathy. It is a solid way to make better-informed business decisions all while turning customers into advocates.
Damien Terwagne, Co-Founder, Dawn
Michele's writing is amongst the very best in the SaaS space at the moment. It's different. Where other books teach the what works, Deploy Empathy will put you in your customers shoes and teach you the all-important why behind what you're asking. As a developer who is currently attempting to validate a few ideas, understanding exactly how to approach people in a way that doesn't come across as a hardcore sales pitch has been a massive help, and this book gives you the exact words and techniques you need to use to get the best results. Without a doubt, Deploy Empathy has already saved us countless hours of coding something nobody actually wants.
Darian Moody, Engineering Lead and co-founder of a company in the discovery phase
Deploy Empathy is a delightful resource for anyone who needs to get people to share sophisticated, important things about their work and business. It is a showcase of clever, fundamental, andmost importantlylearnable conversation skills.
Before reading Deploy Empathy, I thought that a long silence in an interview was an awkward pause. But Michele taught me that silence is just the sound that tremendously valuable information makes just before it arrives. Since reading the book, Ive begun to revel in the so-called awkward pause, instead of fearing it.
Daniel Beck, freelance technical writer
This book prompted me to have my first customer call, and I learned so much! I found myself wanting to insert my own thoughts and opinions so many timesI didnt realize how often I did that until I consciously held back. But I did hold back, and it resulted in my customer opening up a whole lot more. Mirroring and summarizing is also such a power move. Deploy Empathy has been so helpful already, and this is only the beginning.
Adam McCrea, Founder, Rails Autoscale
Empathy is a learnable skill
Your time is too valuable to spend it creating things people dont want.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, talking to people can save you months or years of frustrating, fruitless effort.
You might be afraid that talking to customers (or potential customers) will be a waste of time. That they will only tell you things you already know. Or, worse, that it will be awkward and youll accidentally offend people.
Thats okay.
But you also might be looking for new opportunities. You might be wondering why people cancel. You might be wondering how to get more people to buy. You might be trying to figure out which features to add next. And your data may not be giving you clear answers.
A spreadsheet of data can tell you