3.4: Develop an Empathy Map - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->Now, let's review an empathy map.</v> Empathy map is a helpful technique that allows to visualize user experience and empathize with potential customers. It is essential to have a good understanding of the people who will be using the product that is being built. Empathy provides a straightforward and effective way of identifying user needs through empathy with potential customers. It's one of the customer-centric techniques. In terms of the template, it is literally customer-centric, since the visual representation of the customer is placed in the middle of this one-page map, and the areas around it represent the topics. Who are we empathizing with? What do they need to do? What do they see? What do they say? What do they do? What do they hear from other users? What do they think and how they feel about your product? What are their worries, aspirations and challenges? It is a collaborative technique used by agile teams as a means of putting developers and testing in customer shoes in order to gain deeper insights into what the customers actually need. Similar to user personas, the empathy map represents a group of users. The needs, influencing factors, challenges, and perceptions. This technique was developed by Dave Gray, an agile strategy consultant in 2017. Empathy map is highly effective in anticipating customer needs and providing valuable solutions to meeting those. Its goal is to gather insights into the customer segments, thoughts, feelings, motivations, and needs. This template called Empathy Map Canvas combines observations, serving, interviewing and understanding of job to be done from a customer perspective. Here on this slide, well, for our own version of the empathy map that is inspired by Dave Gray's canvas. But it's important to remember that empathy map was not developed as a standalone solution. According to Dave Gray, it was refined based on the comprehensive product solution which is called business model canvas. It was developed by a Swiss business strategist, Alex Osterwalder. Business model canvas is a strategic product management template and it helps visualize what is important to existing or proposed business model and it forces users to address key areas to achieve alignment and to resonate with their customer personas. A business model overall is a business concept that has been put into practice. A model is always a simplification of a complex reality. It helps to understand the fundamentals of a business or to plan how a future business would look like. The model is a visual representation of key areas of product definition, including core strategies, strategic resources, customer interface, value and they are translated into eight components. The first one is customer segment. Who are the most important customers? The second one is value proposition. What value does this product deliver to customers? And which problems does it solve for them? The third one is revenue stream. For which value are the customers willing to pay? Fourth one is distribution channels. Through which channels do the customer segment want to be reached? And the fourth one is customer relationships. What type of relationship does each of the customer segments expect us to establish and how do we maintain them? Then it includes key activities. What are the key activities that are required by value proposition, distribution channels on customer relationships? It lists key resources. What key resources are required, physical IP, financial and so forth. Who are the key partners, suppliers, vendors, collaborators and finally cost structure. What are the most important costs that are specific to this business model? So all of those questions represent the business model which is the next step in building the empathy map for your customer.