Harvard Business Review Emotional Intelligence Collection (4 Books) (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series)

7

A Process for Empathetic Product Design

By Jon Kolko

The discipline of product management is shifting from an external focus on the market, or an internal focus on technology, to an empathetic focus on people. While it’s not too difficult to rally people around this general idea, it can be hard at first to understand how to translate it into tactics. So in this article, I’ll walk through how we applied this approach to a particular product at a startup and how it led to large-scale adoption and, ultimately, the acquisition of the company.

I was previously VP of design at MyEdu, where we focused on helping students succeed in college, show their academic accomplishments, and gain employment. MyEdu started with a series of free academic planning ...