Episode 224: Why Empathy Is a Product Superpower with Somer Simpson
In this episode, Somer Simpson, VP of Product at customer.io, joins us to discuss the role of empathy in product management. With a wealth of experience in online media and startups, Somer shares how product managers can drive innovation by cultivating empathy for customers and themselves.
She explores how you can have a human-centered approach when crafting products and how self-reflection grows empathy for customers. Somer also highlights the balance between using AI to close knowledge gaps and maintaining a human touch to truly understand user needs.
Are you ready to discover how empathy can improve your product strategy and execution? Don't miss this conversation that offers wisdom for product managers at every career stage.
You'll hear us talk about:
13:00 - Embracing Chaos in Product Management
Somer discusses the need to be comfortable with chaos as a product manager. Like whitewater rafting, being a PM is about leaning into chaos rather than resisting it. This helps managers better discern patterns and innovate effectively.
16:30 - Developing True Empathy
Somer explains that empathy goes beyond the simple observation or acknowledgment of customer pain. It involves accepting others' perspectives as valid. She relates this concept to personal growth, suggesting that self-acceptance is crucial for developing authentic empathy
37:49 - Human Touch in Innovation
Somer believes that humans play an irreplaceable role in innovation, despite advancements in AI. While AI can increase efficiency, it's the human understanding and care for customer problems that truly drive product success.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Somer Simpson: I also encourage product managers on my team to think of their career as a product as well. It should have a roadmap. And also acknowledge that every sort of step that you take is not gonna be a win. So think about it certainly, but don't like over index on trying to find that perfect role that you believe is going to be a huge success 'cause straight up companies lie, and they're not gonna show you what's really going on behind the door. So you have to go in with an open mind and think of every single opportunity as a learning experience.
Sometimes it's hard to see the forest for the trees. And what we found was most of the discovery that was happening, any customer touch points, came from existing customer complaints or something was broken . Got connected up with the product manager. The product manager did discovery and then they built a solution that fixed that one problem for that one customer. That's not how you build product. That's how you plug holes in a sinking product. And so we I tried to help them understand, okay, so that it's necessary discovery that you have to do. But you really need to maybe spend 10% of your time doing that. And the other 90% really focused on data perspective.
Intro
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[00:01:09] PreRoll: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you find your way.
Think like a great product leader. This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
[00:01:47] Melissa Perri: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Our special guest today is Somer Simpson, the VP of Product at customer.io. With nearly three decades of experience in online media and media related startups. Somer has a remarkable track record of leading product teams and driving strategy at major companies like Quantcast and Amplitude.
I'm excited to talk with Somer about how empathy drives great innovation and what product managers can do to get better at it, not just with their customers, but with themselves as well. But before we talk to Somer, it's time for Dear Melissa. This is a segment of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions, and I answer them every single week.
Go to dear melissa.com and let me know what's on your mind.
Hey, product people. I have some very exciting news. Our new mastering product strategy course is now live on Product Institute. I've been working on this course for years to help product leaders tackle one of the biggest challenges I see every day, creating product strategies that drive real business results.
If you're ready to level up your strategy skills, head over to product institute.com and use code launch for $200 off at checkout.
Dear Melissa
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[00:02:50] Melissa Perri: Here's this week's question. Dear Melissa, I feel stuck. I'm new to product management and my background is in frontline healthcare. In other words, I have no idea what I'm doing. Everyone I've worked with says it will eventually come to me, but I've been in my role for a year now and I just don't feel like I grasp any of it.
I listen to podcasts. I read all the product books and subscribe to newsletters. What am I doing wrong? I will say my onboarding process was minimal, but I can't use that as an excuse either because I have peers that have had no onboarding process. What can I do? Do I need to consider a new career? So I empathize with you quite a lot in this situation and I think it's really hard when you end up in a company and it sounds like this is yours, where you don't have a lot of people to learn from.
So as a product leader, you should be mentoring your people new to product management. You should be teaching them the skills that they need to learn. It sounds like you're not getting that. So one, I'd look at your product leader and say. Can you mentor me? Can you be teaching me more of these things?
Especially if you didn't have the onboarding with that. A lot of people are new to product management. We should be training them. We should be helping them. We should be teaching them why they do the things that they do. Not just throwing them into a scrum process saying listen to developers and figuring it out.
This is not a career that is like you follow a process and it just works, right? It's a career where you have to understand why you're doing that. You have to understand why you are empathizing with customers. You have to understand how you go from those problems into solutions, how you start to craft them.
You have to understand how the technology works to do that. And then you also have to understand how the business works so that you craft meaningful solutions that both contribute to that customer value and that business value. And it sounds like you're not being supported to do that. So I feel really bad and I'm really sorry that you're in that area.
What you're doing is great to read the books, study the podcast, take it upon yourself to learn some of those things. But I'd start taking a different approach. Why are the skills and the things that you're reading about important? Maybe instead of just reading about the process, really dig into what do I need to do to get better at some of these aspects of empathizing, understanding, and then translating it into solutions that will help me click in this area.
I'd also ask if you worked in frontline healthcare, are you in a job where you get to solve problems for frontline healthcare people? If you are in a career where it's not relating back to your expertise, it might be hard for you here too. You have this unique advantage as a subject matter expert on this area to craft products for those people.
And if you can do that it's about empathizing with what I needed to do, how hard it was where were things frustrating, and you start to solve those problems that way. If you're not doing it in the area that you have subject matter expertise in, go back to empathy, right? For your customers and for the people that you're building products for, how do you put yourself in their shoes and how do you start to think about what's frustrating for them? Just like it was frustrating for you at your job and your job now too. What are their problems? What about the current solutions do not work? What do you think could make a better solution? And you don't have to come up with all of the solutions on your own.
You could be gathering people to help think through different ideas here. That's something that might be able to help you. I'd also look at studying products that work out there, right? What makes a great product? What doesn't make a great product? I like to do product teardowns with people. What about this is great from a business perspective, a technical perspective, a customer perspective where it solves problems, a UX perspective. Look at all of the facets on that and start to deeply understand what makes a great product. That is really going to help there too. But a lot of this comes down to you weren't given that foundation when you started. And a lot of people do get thrown into product management.
I see it every single day where they weren't given a foundation, they weren't given the guide on how to go do this, how to get started with this. But you also need that fundamental picture of why product management matters, right? What is important about building products that we bring to the table?
So I'd really go back to the basics there, not just the process on stuff. If you're working with your developers and you don't understand what they're saying or why that's important, talk to your developers as well. Sit down and say Hey, yeah, I need you to explain to me like how this all works. I work with a lot of product managers as well, who may not be super technical.
And that's okay if you are supposed to partner with the product with the technical lead there so that you can help explain solutions to them. And you can help explain why things matter from a customer perspective and a business perspective, and then they turn it into a technical perspective.
Developers will say terms and stuff that you won't know and you don't need to know all of it, but you need to know why it's hard to do certain things. What are some technical aspects of that that make it harder? And how you can leverage technology to solve problems in unique ways. So I'd get up to speed on some of those concepts from a technical perspective, but don't worry about some of the super finer details of code or anything like that.
It is overwhelming. Learning product management from scratch is absolutely overwhelming. There is some defined ways to do this. This is why I started Product Institute, to try to give training for people 'cause I saw how overwhelming it was. But I will say like even just learning a basic framework for it, that's not where it ends, right?
It keeps going. So I think you have to take a step back as well and say, do I feel like I'm going to be successful in this career? And do I feel like it's for me? And it's not a failure if it's not what you wanna do, right? If it's what you wanna do and you got into it for the right reasons of solving customers problems and through great solutions, then the idea here is how do I go back to the basics and really focus on that?
How do I figure out how to do that well? And then bring that into all of your process, right? Bring that into all the conversations with your engineers and with your leaders and with other people, right? That's what you can focus on. So I hope that helps. I know it can be super frustrating. It also sounds like it might be a good opportunity for you to go somewhere where you can learn if you're not surrounded by a bunch of people who want to help you or want to teach you there, right? So people who are new at product management, they need to learn from somebody. Where are you gonna go to learn? You can do some of it yourself, but it's really good to observe other people doing it super well.
So while you said that you can't complain, 'cause other people had minimal onboarding as well, are they doing it well? Can you observe it from them? And if not, that's where I would find somewhere with support. So I wish you the best of luck and I hear your frustration and I hope it gets better. And in the meantime, I hope that our podcasts are helping you learn too. So now let's go talk to Somer and hear her words of wisdom. Welcome to the show, Somer.
[00:09:22] Somer Simpson: Hey, thanks for having me.
[00:09:24] Melissa Perri: So you have had a great career in product management that has led you to customer io. Can you tell us a little bit about what got you into the field and how did you end up at this company?
[00:09:33] Somer Simpson: The more I get this question, the more I ask other people this question the more I hear a very similar answer. In fact, I'm doing a bunch of interviews for an open role that we have right now, and I ask, I folks this, and it's always the same. And we're like, yeah, me too. It was an accident. I fell into it.
I went to school for photojournalism and was a photographer at a paper. And happened to be one of the young kids in the building, and they asked us to build a BBS. Remember we used to get floppies and you could, that's how you dialed up into a particular service to put the newspaper online.
This is way back in the day, 94. And so we went off and we started doing that. And then I, we came back, there were three of us came back and said, Hey, this BBS thing is dumb. Have you heard of this thing called the web? And they were like, no, but do go do whatever. So we ended up building a website.
I learned HML in an hour. I already was, don't tell anybody, but downloading Adobe Photoshop for free and
[00:10:33] Melissa Perri: I did that too.
[00:10:35] Somer Simpson: yeah, on a dial up that yeah, it was awful. But but yeah, so I was, I did graphic design, I did photography, I did all the things and we not only launched and put the paper online, but we also created an online only, digiscene, which is what we were calling it at the time, that was focused on the college audience. And that was a blast. And I was just hooked on digital. I also converted the photography department from doing dark room stuff to digital, so scanning their film, using Photoshop to optimize it and shipping it to the camera department.
And yeah. So from there I just, I went digital through a bunch of different newspapers. Ended up the Miami Herald. And then, it was late 1998, was asked to come out to San Jose and be the first product manager for Knight Ridder. It was called Knightridder.com at the time, but Knight Ridder Digital, which was the new business unit that they were spinning up that was purely focused on digital.
And I never looked back. For me, the transition from journalism to product is really it's really easy. It's a no brainer, right? We're trained to go up to perfect strangers and talk to them, ask them what they're doing, ask 'em if it's okay, if we can take a picture of them, and have those kinds of conversations, the kind of things that you need to do with with your customers.
And and be able to be a Jack or Jane of all trades. Yeah, that's how I got there. And I've done a series of ground up startups, which were absolutely grueling to the point where, I would take breaks going and working, taking big jobs at big corporate companies. That was my break.
[00:12:04] Melissa Perri: I'm sure the companies are listening to this being like, Ugh. But
[00:12:08] Somer Simpson: Yeah.
[00:12:09] Melissa Perri: it's not the first time I've heard that at all.
[00:12:12] Somer Simpson: But yeah, there's a, it's a different thing. Startups allow you to be passionate and take risks and do all kinds of fun stuff, but you've always got that feeling of where's the next paycheck gonna come from? Hanging over your head.
[00:12:24] Melissa Perri: yeah.
[00:12:24] Somer Simpson: And also feeling very alone. Versus in larger companies, it's a lot easier to like.
Hide and just do job which to me is boring.
[00:12:33] Melissa Perri: Yeah. And it is true. I think there's I've seen a lot of people who've gone from corporate to startup and they're
[00:12:38] Somer Simpson: yeah.
[00:12:39] Melissa Perri: in the world is this?
[00:12:42] Somer Simpson: Yeah.
[00:12:43] Melissa Perri: like there are no processes. It's the w Wild West over here. I don't know if we were gonna have enough runway to make it to next year.
Like it's just so much, besides just doing your job, and there's something about a corporation that just takes care of sometimes the
[00:12:58] Somer Simpson: Yeah.
[00:12:58] Melissa Perri: of it, not
[00:12:59] Somer Simpson: Yeah.
[00:12:59] Melissa Perri: time, but sometimes the rest of it.
[00:13:00] Somer Simpson: And the thing is, life is balanced chaos, right? It is chaos that is always seeking balance. And I tell a lot of my product managers, don't be afraid when things feel crazy, lean into that and it's like when you go whitewater rafting. And they tell you if you fall out of the boat, don't fight it. Just relax and go with the flow and you're more likely to survive. And that, that's the same kind of thing. It's once you embrace that chaos and you just lean back and you listen and you feel it it's a lot easier to pick up on those signals and identify the trends that are in it and pattern match.
[00:13:36] Melissa Perri: that's something that I hear actually a lot for. From product managers, right? Even if they're in a large company or a small company, it feels like chaos constantly to them. And I think one, it's because product management is so not well defined in a lot of places. But do you think be a great product manager there has to be an element of being okay with the chaos or in kay with things going off the rails sometimes?
[00:13:58] Somer Simpson: Definitely because I think if you try to fight it, you're not going to. You're not gonna survive like mentally, emotionally and you're not gonna succeed. Product management is about give and take and balance because your core job, it's not just about being the voice of the customer.
It's about figuring out how do you solve problems that bring value to customers, but in a way that also have impact on the business, right? So it's like the whole Marty Cagan customer value company viability, right? And you can't do that if you're not comfortable with some amount of chaos.
I appreciate my PMs, who like me, I am, I'm chaotic myself. And in that chaos, and I do appreciate the PMs who are very detail oriented and like to structure things and 'cause it helps me, right? And it helps the whole team. But again, another balance thing, when you start talking about teams, right?
[00:14:54] Melissa Perri: When you think of what makes a great product manager, what do you look for?
[00:14:58] Somer Simpson: I spent a lot of time thinking about this. There's all kinds of theories. I have a Somer-losophy document that I always share with my PMs that's got all the standard stuff like, don't let perfection stand in the way of good, and, those kinds of idioms.
I refined mine down to more of a, it's who you are, not necessarily what you do. In what I look for in, in product folks. And I threw it on a t-shirt and I gave it to my product team when I was at Quantcast for a Christmas New Year's gift, in 2019, not knowing that 2020 was gonna be, the disaster that it was. But the t-shirt said it, it's basically the three traits that I look for.
Empathy being number one. And we can talk a little bit more about that one. But I can talk all day about that one. Curiosity being the next one, right? So you've, and a lot of these will start to sound like how two year olds behave, 'cause when I think curiosity, it's not just being curious about things and understanding how things work, but it's that obnoxious little 2-year-old that's but why mom? But why? And you just keep asking why until you get to the root of things, right? And because until then you're just observing symptoms.
And then the third one is tenacity. I'm a big believer that immovable objects don't exist. Because only unstoppable forces can, right? And so I like to get my team to think like it's an unstoppable force. There's always a way around, under, through, to solve something.
Empathy starts with yourself
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[00:16:30] Melissa Perri: When you think about empathy. This is one that comes up a lot for our product managers. I think people get tripped up on like, how do you actually develop empathy, right?
[00:16:40] Somer Simpson: Yep.
[00:16:40] Melissa Perri: We talk about it, it's this thing that everybody accepts. Like all product managers need to have empathy for their customers. For you, what does it mean to actually empathize with customers and how do you start to think about actually doing that, like developing that empathy?
[00:16:54] Somer Simpson: I think you're right. I think a lot of people misunderstand the term empathy and they, because you hear a lot of people say, I need to like, walk in my customer's shoes or sit in their pain and they don't truly understand what that means. It's not just about observing and acknowledging it's really about accepting.
And that's the critical piece. And I got to this perspective on empathy. Looking at my personal life. And my, and applying it to my work life. I treat myself like a product manager or like a product, right? I'm a product manager for my own product. But if you look at my personal life, it's just been an unbelievable failure, right? I've had just failed project after failed project in terms of like long-term relationships and such. But every single one of those, there have been lessons that have come out of that. And I started I've actually spent the past couple of years doing a lot of self-reflection and thinking through love.
What is love and. You can't really love someone without having empathy for them because love without empathy is just codependency, right? And to me, empathy is, it's not just seeing things from people's perspective. It requires you to first accept that person for who they are. And accept that, their perception of the world, their way of thinking, their way of doing, their way of everything is just as valid as yours.
And it's okay. And once you, it's almost like forgiveness in a way, right? Once you have that acceptance, then you're more likely to have a healthy love relationship. Now there's a blocker. That because you can't truly empathize with others and love other people unless you love yourself.
And loving yourself requires you to be empathetic to yourself, which means you accept yourself for who you are. As that, never ending project that can constantly be optimized and improved and iterated on. So that's how I, that's how I think about empathy.
[00:18:55] Melissa Perri: So do we think product managers need to love themselves before they can love their customers
[00:18:59] Somer Simpson: Everybody needs to.
[00:19:00] Melissa Perri: I love it.
[00:19:01] Somer Simpson: Everybody needs to, but yeah. But certainly product managers. I had a after my last startup zero to one startup we shut it down. I took three, three or four months off. And just exploring how did I find myself in this place where I don't look forward to going to work like I in, in fact, I would rather do anything than go to work, right? And do my job. And so I started exploring like why I was feeling that way. And I remember one afternoon I was living in San Francisco at the time and was hanging out at little wine bar there.
With a friend of mine who's he's in he's like a sales leader. And we were having this conversation and I'm like, oh, I'm so unhappy, like why don't I miss like that feeling? And he's like, well, think back to the last time you had that feeling. And I came up with two examples.
One was Knight Ridder where and then the second one was my first startup. Where I couldn't wait to get up in the morning. I was thinking about work on the way in. I would find myself sitting at my desk till at nine o'clock at night and would have to force myself to go home. I was dreaming about problems and solving them in my sleep.
And he's okay, what's the difference between the companies you've been working at? And those? And I was like it's partly, it's like the people I work with, but there's some really cool people here. The products are cool but they're not really interesting and anyway, we just, he kept digging deep, deeper, and deeper. And we came to the conclusion was that I didn't love my customer. I wasn't passionate about my customer. I didn't, I wasn't taking the time to empathize with them and understand them because I just didn't, I didn't care.
So I'm like, okay, my next job is going to have customers that I care about, right?
That's gonna be the first criteria and the basis which is how I ended up at Quantcast. And it traced back to my journalism days where I joined the publisher team at Quantcast. And the product was audience analytics for publishers so that they could do a better job of understanding the audiences that they wanted to sell to advertisers so they could make higher CPMs.
And I looked at this as enabling newspapers and media companies to make money so they could stay in business. So that people like us could continue to have free access to news information, which is a critical sort of pillar of our democracy. So I looked at, I like, okay, I found a job where I'm saving democracy. Awesome.
[00:21:30] Melissa Perri: That's really cool. It's so self-reflective to go back through that and start to think on it. I've had product managers come up to me too and say: what if I don't know anything about the customers I'm building this for? What if I don't really care about this industry? And I think it's, I think it's hard when you're starting out to get the first job and be like, I need to be, I need to learn that, right?
You need to learn if you care or not. Always I find that I could find something interesting to try to grasp onto most of the places, but then after a while I think you have to say, am I really passionate about this? 'cause there's so much energy that goes into building these products and that big piece of building that empathy, comes into play for the product manager.
So I love that you went down this whole rabbit hole trying to figure out
[00:22:09] Somer Simpson: Yeah.
[00:22:10] Melissa Perri: like where to go.
[00:22:11] Somer Simpson: Yeah.
[00:22:11] Melissa Perri: So you came into Quantcast and you knew something about the industry. How do you propose for people that don't know anything about the industry, but really wanna understand their customers, right?
Or build that empathy, how do they get started? If you're not a subject matter expertise, can you still go and learn about your customers and figure out if you can empathize with them?
Curiosity, failure, and building customer love
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[00:22:29] Somer Simpson: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, in the same way that I just talked about, I am a product manager of myself as the product. I also encourage product managers on my team to think of their career as a product as well. It should have a roadmap. You should have particular milestones and things that you want to explore and learn from.
And also acknowledge that every sort of step that you take is not gonna be a win. So think about it certainly, but don't like over index on trying to find that perfect role that you believe is going to be a huge success because nine times out of 10 you're gonna be wrong. 'cause straight up companies lie, they're selling you, they want you to come work and they're not gonna as sales would say, open the kimono and show you what's really going on behind, behind the door. So you have to go in with an open mind and think of every single opportunity as a learning experience.
And even if, you find a job that some aspects of it, you're like, oh, I could learn this and this from this, but I don't know the industry, I don't understand the customer. Those are things that you can overcome. You can learn those things, there's more to the job and your craft than just, the customer and the industry and knowledge of those problems. There's also, improving your craft constantly over time.
[00:23:48] Melissa Perri: Yeah. I think that's important too. I meet so many people early in their careers who think that the first job that they get has to be a
[00:23:54] Somer Simpson: Yeah.
[00:23:54] Melissa Perri: slam dunk. And even when I was teaching like a BA students, they were like, oh, if I don't end up in the right place, it's gonna be awful or I have to go to a startup 'cause I can hit it big. And I was like, to land somewhere on your feet. It's not
[00:24:06] Somer Simpson: Yeah.
[00:24:06] Melissa Perri: your last job. Fortunately, we're all probably gonna be working for a while, but it's I think it's so important to, to learn from those failures. And I know I've failed at a bunch of jobs along the way, but I think that's a great trait to, in product managers, to be able to self-reflect, understand where things went wrong, or take what you can from certain places and then incorporate that into your next job.
[00:24:26] Somer Simpson: Yep. Three of my four startups failed which is still pretty good odds. Although the, the first one was. I wouldn't call it a failure, but I also wouldn't call it a success. But I learned on the third one. I should have learned a lesson from that, but I repeated it on my fourth one, which was both of them were solutions looking for problems. But after that second learning, I'm like, I am never repeating that again.
[00:24:55] Melissa Perri: Yeah, and that's a big one too, right? A lot of companies do that where it's just solutions looking for problems. And I think that's why we talk about empathizing with your customers. So when you are helping your product managers empathize with the customers, try to understand their problems. What are some pitfalls that you see product managers get into where they maybe do it wrong or they're not getting the outcomes that they wanted and it's not, it's I feel like it's not true empathy, right? We're just like, oh, those people are frustrated with this, but we don't really understand why or we're not following through. Where do you see people get into those traps?
[00:25:26] Somer Simpson: When they get into reactionary mode, right? So this goes back to the chaos. When the chaos be and the noise of the chaos becomes too much and they get into that reactionary mo mode and they just want the chaos to stop. They sort of default to a very specific type of discovery which puts them in a place where they're operating like a feature team, right?
A commercial driven feature team. So I actually just went through this exercise with my team and I built a well, I pulled off my shelf this discovery tracker that I've used at a couple of companies now to help. Track the amount and type of discovery that each of the PMs are doing so that we can set goals and things like that and really just get a sense of how are we operating.
And I had to tell them, I'm like, this is I'm not measuring you. This is not a judgment. This is just to give you visibility into your, what you're doing. Because sometimes it's hard to see the forest for the trees. And what we found was most of the discovery that was happening the any customer touch points came from existing customer complaints Or had a feature request or something was broken or whatever. Got connected up with the product manager. The product manager did discovery and then went and sat with the team and they built a solution that fixed that one problem for that one customer. That's not how you build product. That's how you plug holes in a sinking product.
And so we I tried to help them understand, okay, so that it's necessary discovery that you have to do. But you really need to maybe spend 10% of your time doing that. And the other 90% really focused on, looking at from a data perspective, so this is where the quantitative can come in.
As you've got all this feedback coming in from all these different sources and stakeholders and direct customers, you identify trends in that. So mental cluster analysis, you're like, oh, here's a trend. This looks like an interesting cluster of problems. There could be opportunity there.
And as you start to explore that's more proactive customer-centric discovery. And you'll get a lot of good stuff out of there, right? That has, good value for customers and opportunity for company impact. That's cool. So that's about half of that 90%. The other half of that 90% is what I tend to call customer therapy sessions.
And it's really about not having a reason to sit with a customer beyond. I just wanted to check in and hang out with you and see how life's going. Not even about our product in particular, but about your role and your job, your jobs to be done. And just have an open conversation.
Put them, ask 'em how things are going. Ask them to, to think back the last time that they did something and focus more on the feelings of it. Because that's where you're gonna identify the problems, right? And then you narrow in on, on that feeling, and this is where the big chunks of gold can be discovered.
And this is something that I actually learned from my boss at the CPO when I was at Quantcast. Amazing guy. Huge growth mindset, constantly learning, constantly reading and bringing stuff back to the team. And we learned that sort of like having that constant thread of ongoing open dialogue therapy sessions with customers.
And that actually led to pretty two pretty significant products when we were at Quantcast.
Meaningful discovery and avoiding chaos
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[00:28:47] Melissa Perri: Wow, that's really cool.
[00:28:48] Somer Simpson: yeah.
[00:28:49] Melissa Perri: when you're zeroing in on that feeling and trying to, discern what's going on there. What should you be looking for? What are signals that are saying like, Hey, I'm onto something here.
[00:28:58] Somer Simpson: It's body language. So this is why this is the difference between qualitative and quantitative is there's more than data is just it's flat, right? It's a two dimensional thing. That one-on-one or one to many conversation you can have with customers is more three dimensional.
And you get the emotional, psychological aspects from it. And because there are things that customers will tell you what they think you wanna hear. And customers will tell you what they think they need. And you really have to dig to get to the right answers. And, only believe half of what customers say, right?
But you watch for those visual signals of of discomfort, of confusion, of whatever that emotion is. And then this is where the curiosity comes in, is going, in your mind, seeing it, recognize it and going I wonder what caused that. And then dig into that a little bit. Right?
[00:29:51] Melissa Perri: For teams that like a lot of them these days are remote and we can't just go sit with our customers or maybe observe them as they go about tasks or
[00:29:59] Somer Simpson: Yeah.
[00:29:59] Melissa Perri: different things like that. What are ways that you can build empathy then?
[00:30:02] Somer Simpson: Fully remote. It's hard. We are in the process of actually establishing a CAB right now, like an executive CAB. All my PMs are in the process of establishing their own personal CABs so that they can have those ready to go people. Available anytime to give feedback on something.
And we're taking a multi-tiered approach. We're inviting each product manager is inviting their cab into a Slack channel. So you can have
[00:30:27] Melissa Perri: customer advisory board.
[00:30:28] Somer Simpson: Yes. Thank you. Sorry. No, the taxi, right? The,
[00:30:31] Melissa Perri: the taxi. I was like, oh, let's get a taxi.
[00:30:33] Somer Simpson: yeah.
[00:30:34] Melissa Perri: find them.
[00:30:34] Somer Simpson: But having that sort of constant communication at different levels. So having that slack, which allows you to have impromptu conversations, it also allows the CAB members to talk amongst themselves and for the product manager to observe that conversation happening. 'cause there's a lot that can happen. When customers talk to each other. And then we are doing individual video call interviews, group interview call interviews and exercises. We're trying to create some structure to it so that they get value out of it. We get value out of it.
And it's not just, getting on a call and going through a series of questions and listening to the answer. It's more conversational. And focus on a topic, right? So you only have to commit 15 minutes, 30 minutes, right? To get to the gist of something really helps with the virtual kind of approach.
[00:31:23] Melissa Perri: Nice. With the customary advisory boards, like what's the best way to structure them so that they don't get too biased or you're like gravitating towards one person or one type of person.
[00:31:33] Somer Simpson: That's a, that's actually my a perfect question because I just had this conversation with our VP of product marketing and our VP of customer success experience. The three of us are designing our CAB together and, we have tenants that we wrote down. So had to be diverse.
What do we mean by diverse? Different different roles across the spectrum. So our we build products for growth teams, right? And most people think growth. They think growth marketing or lifecycle marketing. But really there's this, it's been emerging for a long time but not so much outside of tech.
But a growth team is actually the sits in the middle between marketing and product, and that's who we're aiming for, right? So we can get product and growth together. So we want a balance of persona and responsibility. So we want some marketing people, we want some product people, we want some data people.
And we want a mix of executives and frontline managers, so team managers. So that's one aspect of diversity. The other is which I just outright insist on is it has to be diverse from a DEI perspective. So a good balance of men and women. Which is not hard when your customers are mostly marketing because so many marketers are women and maybe not so much CMOs, but certainly a lot of marketers are women.
And and then just in, in terms of just background, right? I like to have a diverse set of faces in front of me. The whole reason behind, DEI in companies is to give different perspectives, right? Different facets of life, look at things in different ways. And I want that applied to the cab as well.
[00:33:13] Melissa Perri: I think that's important too. I've found people with different backgrounds can come up with ways that we've never thought about a problem or a solution before. So I think that's a great approach there.
[00:33:22] Somer Simpson: Yeah, and those are the two most important things. The others are just diversity in industry and, company size and things like that.
AI can't replace empathy
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[00:33:28] Melissa Perri: One of the things that I've been seeing, and we should talk about AI trends in product management, but I have seen this one trend and I'm curious, your take on it where people are using ai like the customer, so they're actually like chatting with chat PT and they're like, Hey, you are a marketing person at a growth stage company and this is your background, blah, blah, blah.
I'm gonna ask you some questions about this product. And they're like bypassing customer research to do that. What are your thoughts on that?
[00:33:56] Somer Simpson: This is another area that we've been having a lot of debate on recently, both outside my company and team. Just with friends in general. Even people outside of tech are having this kind of debate. My office hours have certainly become a drop in zone for everybody to hang out and talk about the latest AI thing that they've played around with or discovered.
To me it's kind of it's a it's a double edged sword, right? So I am personally incredibly excited about all the advancements in AI and the things it's gonna unlock, especially as somebody with ADHD. This has been a it's been a miracle for me. It is so hard for me to sit down and write some long form doc, but being a remote company, long form docs are our love language inside the company. It's just how we communicate and document stuff. It's a necessary thing. And I struggle with it. I can write a paragraph at a time and then I gotta go do something else. But AI has really helped me just throw down bullets or I can take a voice recording and transcribe that and then dump it into AI and have it like, help me build it.
So it's great, especially for accessibility. But I think where we have to be careful is becoming too dependent on it and losing your craft or brand new product managers to the craft, never actually learning it and learning the why behind the craft. And I liken this to my photography days because, actually my father was a photographer, so I was in the dark room when I was like three years old, sitting there while he printed and ran film. Started out using a manual camera. So I really, had to understand the reasons behind aperture settings and shutter speeds and how to think about things in milliseconds in order to adjust and get that shot.
And, carry that all the way through. And I think, I look at my daughter who has grown up with cell phones. And digital cameras and everything else, and, things that are just, it's easier for them, it's more accessible. But they haven't learned the why behind it. And I think, product using ai for product management is gonna be a similar thing. It'll, it's, it'll be very easy for people to become dependent on it. And, not lower learn the core soft skills, and the and the reasons behind it.
[00:36:21] Melissa Perri: Yeah. I think it's important to remember there's still like a ton of bias in the AI too.
[00:36:24] Somer Simpson: Yes.
[00:36:25] Melissa Perri: it, so I asked chat GPT, there was this thing floating around on LinkedIn that I saw and I was like, I gotta do this myself. And I said, what do you think I look like after talking to chat GPT forever?
It was like. A mid thirties man with like glasses. And I was like, Nope, that's not me. I said, what if I was a woman? It was like, oh, how biased of me to do that to you. And I was like, yeah, it was. And they were like you're very eloquent and well-spoken and stuff like that.
So I, I believe like you're pretty smart and you probably, you seem to work in the tech field and you seem to be like pretty knowledgeable about product management. So I think you're an expert in product management.
[00:36:57] Somer Simpson: Yeah.
[00:36:58] Melissa Perri: man,
[00:36:59] Somer Simpson: Yeah.
[00:37:00] Melissa Perri: okay, thanks.
[00:37:01] Somer Simpson: And it's interesting too that you say that because bias is about only basing your thinking on what you already know. And all of our knowledge is limited. This is the debate that I got in my, with, in with my friend who's not even in tech. And and basically I, I likened it to what's it called? The snake eating its tail, Ouroboros, is that what it's called? Anyway, so that, that is what things could become, right? Because just like what social media did to the world and us being in our bubbles. And then, and the, just the divide that it created a similar thing can happen with AI because AI only knows what other people have thought and written down.
So if we get too much in regurgitating that information, there goes innovation.
[00:37:49] Melissa Perri: Yep.
[00:37:49] Somer Simpson: I really think it takes a human mindset to innovate. AI could help. Help us fill in the gaps of what we don't know. Those unknown unknowns as Rumsfeld would call. But but yeah, so there's that's that double-edged sword that you have to be aware of.
[00:38:04] Melissa Perri: I've heard a lot of people put it and I think this one works really well where AI can enhance a lot of the stuff that we're doing. Make it a little faster. I think like tools like Lovable and Bolt are amazing 'cause you can get
[00:38:15] Somer Simpson: Yeah.
[00:38:15] Melissa Perri: You can prototype stuff and get it out there and actually test if it's there. But if you're just using that to spin up things with no thought or no, like reasoning behind it and not doing the research or like the empathy that we're talking about, we're just gonna have a bunch of like really crappy code out there and all these products that nobody's gonna use at the end of the day.
[00:38:32] Somer Simpson: Yeah
[00:38:33] Melissa Perri: I don't see where everybody's scared AI is gonna replace everything. But I don't see where we can take a human out of the picture and still innovate.
[00:38:40] Somer Simpson: Agree. Agree a hundred percent. And AI can't empathize with a human being. You, in order to care enough to build something great and to innovate, you have to care about your customer. You have to care about the problems that they have, and really have a desire to solve them.
[00:38:55] Melissa Perri: I think that's great advice for people out there. Somer, I got one more question for you. If you could go back and tell your younger self one piece of advice, what would you do?
[00:39:02] Somer Simpson: Just have patience for yourself. And it is okay to say, I don't know, because you don't always have to be right and most often you're not. So I could have saved myself a world of trouble.
[00:39:15] Melissa Perri: I wish I knew that younger too.
[00:39:17] Somer Simpson: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:39:18] Melissa Perri: I think, I thought I knew everything for a while and wanted to appear that way, but
[00:39:23] Somer Simpson: Yeah.
[00:39:23] Melissa Perri: never the best way. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. If people wanna learn more about you and customer.io, where can they go?
[00:39:30] Somer Simpson: Visit customer io. And feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. If you wanna see some of my photography, I have, SomerSimpson.com. People will find that. By the way it's like Homer Simpson, but with an S.
[00:39:42] Melissa Perri: We, and we will put those links in how it's spelled on our show notes at productthinkingpodcast.com. Thank you so much for joining us on the Product Thinking Podcast Somer, and thank you to our listeners out there. We will put all of those links in how to reach Somer on product thinking podcast.com.
And if you have any questions for me before our next episode next week, go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.