In many ways, it’s the voices that come out of left field that are the most valuable of all. Because if there’s one fundamental reason we should be opening ourselves up to external feedback, it’s to step out of our comfort zones and walk in our customers’ shoes. The oddballs challenge us to do this, since we can’t just flatten their input into another stat in a feature spreadsheet.
In a word: it’s about empathy. Immersion in our customers’ lives allows us to experience what they do, outside of the tyranny of our hard-nosed strategies and backwards looking data. We learn that our words don’t make sense to people outside our bubble. That there are new, unexpected problems that we could solve through small changes to our interface. That we’re asking the wrong questions.
Empathy itself doesn’t always translate into changes to our roadmap, or the addition of new features. Often the greatest successes are when we redesign existing features to be better tuned to real customer use. In a larger sense, with each step we take towards fully integrating our customers’ lives into our experience, we’re building “empathic organizations” with fates deeply intertwined with the people we serve. This in turn can’t help but create more moral, more meaningful businesses. That’s a giant step for mankind.
