Empathize with Your User

To understand and share the feelings of another.

How can you help someone if you don't know what they're feeling? How can you offer them value if you don't understand their pain?

That's the job.

Beyond the message and the copy, building a solution for an audience starts with understanding what's actually bothering them: what slows them down, what they're going through, what they'd fix if they could. Only then can you aim to alleviate it with your product.

Empathy lets you put yourself in their shoes in a practical way, not just an aspirational one. You start to understand their frustration, the stakes, the complexity. And from that place, you can start to picture what an ideal solution actually looks like.

It also forces you to get specific about who you're talking to. Developer or non-technical, decision-maker or end-user, exec or operator: each person experiences the same problem differently. Empathy is how you tell the difference, and how you adapt your approach accordingly.

At the end of it: everyone has problems they're trying to solve. The more clearly you understand theirs, the better your chances of actually helping.