Being Empathetic as a Developer Squad

As I work in a rapid growing startup — where everything have to fast forward and the changes could be immediately come in a tight time, we have to take immediate action in planning and also executing the task.

We have go through many times when we have to think as a user also. Of course, it’s a big switch since ‘we are not the user’. For example, my CEO told me that we need to improve our product list page. Then, we have to ‘switch’ our mode in order to plan how’s the suitable and proper way for our users when they experience this page. Then, we ‘switch’ back to developer mode to execute the plan that we have arranged when we are in user mode.

Things that we do for being empathetic as a user is learn from our experience. How do we experience the similar thing when we use another products? How do we feel when we experience it? How is the pain point when we use that product? Those questions we often ask to sort out the solution of how our action might be.

Sure, there wouldn’t reflect the entire insight of our user when we develop the product. There would be something that mismatched. But, this thing — at least helps us for how it should be reasonable to execute.

Even though we are not the user, at least we have intuition as a user. If we found something’s good, implement it. If it’s a pain point, improve it or leave it.