For many design professionals, empathy can feel so reflexive it’s hardly a choice. It’s often our instinctive desire to solve a problem for someone else that draws us to design in the first place. But if the phrase “stakeholder empathy” gives you the heebie-jeebies, well, I don’t blame you.
It brings to mind images of Veruca Salt-style footstamping temper tantrums, in which the most powerful person in the room demands that everyone below them in the hierarchy prioritize that stakeholder’s own sense of entitlement. “Won’t someone think of how this impacts me?!” they wail. Indulging such a stakeholder can sound like a recipe for the opposite of the user empathy we aspire to practice.
It also sometimes chafes because it can seem as if we’re being asked to give up own our independent judgment and align to a value system that may not be our own. When your value proposition is closely linked to your independent judgment, this can feel like a betrayal of both your intentions and your identity.
Christina Goldschmidt, VP of product design for Warner Music Group, illustrates a more constructive approach to stakeholder empathy in our conversation on the latest episode of our design leadership podcast Finding Our Way. It starts with what she calls “proto-personas”— lightweight profiles of your stakeholders that provide a sketch of what they care about, tend to focus on, or prioritize. She then takes that into roleplaying scenarios with her team to help them both better understand and respond to that stakeholder’s concerns.
As I put it with my coaching clients: Every interaction you have with a stakeholder is user research. Use it that way. That means creating protocols for conversations—or at least intentions. Setting aside time to analyze what was said in those conversations. Making models that capture your understanding of the dynamics of needs, motivations, and psychology that drive the attention and decision making of those people. Continuing to iterate and revise that understanding based on new data.
Just as with your users, you don’t have to ascribe to the worldview of your stakeholders in order to design effective solutions for them. But without methods to explore and understand that worldview (and set your own intentions relative to it) you’ll find yourself beholden to, and sometimes blindsided by, forces you can’t even see—never mind influence.
Jesse James Garrett 