One Saturday last fall, my MBA capstone team1 gathered in a classroom at the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business to figure out, finally, what our team was going to present as a viable business at the end of the semester. We had spent all summer interviewing “customers”—our potential customers were parents—pivoted once, tweaked our target market countless times, and now it was time to decide what it was we were actually going to do.
Our team’s challenge was that, while we felt like we were making progress with our interviews, we still weren’t able to agree on the business we wanted to present and defend. When we would meet, we would share different ideas, but we struggled to cohere around a plan. We decided to get together in person and force ourselves to decide.
At one point during our in-person meeting, someone on the team got up and started passionately sharing about one of the interviews they had had with a parent. Parenting can be so hard sometimes and this parent had reached a breaking point. “I’m confused,” my teammate recalled the parent saying, “I don’t know what my child needs.”
Aha!
Then another team member spoke up about a similar moment in one of their interviews where a parent remembered, “I was really upset. I screamed and yelled.”
Aha!
Pretty soon we were at the whiteboard collecting stories of pain points from the many conversations we had had throughout the summer. The way we told the stories, you could almost feel it, like the parents were in the room with you. There was real pain here. Could we come up with a business idea that addressed that pain?
It was at this point that business ideas started to emerge again. But something was different. We could actually start agreeing on a path forward.
What changed?
Moments of empathy
I’ve been doing work lately that has me doing a bunch of interviews, and one of the things I’m finding is that there are a handful of moments in each of these hour-long conversations that are packed with depth and meaning. They come in a flash, and then the moment is gone and we’re onto another topic. It’s almost weird to describe it.
One of the things that’s interesting about these moments is that the quotes themselves don’t give all the depth. Sometimes you have to listen to the audio of the person’s voice and relive what it’s like for them to share their story. You struggle to reduce the person’s story to “data” because—you’re starting to realize—“data” is starting to feel like the wrong way to capture the moment. And speaking of “capturing”, why is it your business to capture the moment? Is that really what you’re trying to do? To hold it in so it doesn’t escape?
When we’re the person sharing, I think what we’re trying to do is let out something that doesn’t want to be held in. Those moments in conversation where we let down some wall and share our actual, real, human emotion, we don’t always let that out in words. We let it out in sighs, laughs, tears, long pauses, emotions. It emerges from us. It’s like we’re an infant again, without the ability to use words, and we want the attention of the people we feel closest to. We don’t want to be data. We want to be seen.
Bottling empathy
If you’re a researcher, if you’re the person having those conversations and wanting to share them, your “data” isn’t so much “data” in the traditional sense, but it’s the fact that you have a moment that represents a point of empathy that you want someone else to experience. “Hey, listen to this.” The words might have meaning, but you’re not having them listen for the words. You’re having them listen for the experience, for the meaning. “Feel what this person felt. Let it affect you. Let it change you.” You’re saying, “I want you to be changed by this other person’s experience and I want that to influence your thoughts, emotions, and actions.”
One of the things I’ve been working on in my research is figuring out a process behind “bottling empathy”, how to take these flashes of depth and meaning and present them in a way so that they can be shared. But I don’t want to share them as mere data2. I want them to be experienced. I want my audience to go beyond the words, to experience the emotions in the person’s voice. I want them to have empathy.
Systematic bottling of empathy
Not too long ago, if you wanted to piece together customer stories to tell a single narrative, you had to either settle for sharing just snippets of the transcription in document form, or you had to be a professional video editor, combining multiple clips in Adobe Premiere Pro and maybe even adding background music. It was a lot of effort!
It’s amazing to me how far we’ve come and what tools are available for bottling empathy. The tools below all produce very good AI generated transcripts and are excellent research tools.
For sales teams, there’s Gong. Since they’re marketing to sales managers, I just sort of assume I’m not going to be able to afford them. But! It’s an amazing tool and if you already have it at your organization, it can be an an incredible research tool.
For generic meeting recordings, there’s Otter.ai. They’ve been around for a while and will join all of your meetings. It’s mostly audio only with occasional screenshots thrown in.
The most recent tool I’ve found out about—and what I’m currently using—is Grain, which has as its tag line, “AI-powered meeting recording for all teams, not just sales”. So like, Gong, but for everyone else. Perfect.
One thing I like about Grain is how it records video as well as audio. When you make highlights, you can easily assemble those highlights into a supercut video right within the app. No video editing skills required. It’s really kind of insane.
Finding the moments that matter
What changed for my MBA capstone group was that we came together as a group to start focusing on our customers’ pain. It was in their stories and key moments from those conversations that got us to really understand their needs. Looking back, I really wish our team had more powerful tools for cataloguing our conversations for later research3.
While this post is about “bottling empathy”, the purpose isn’t to bottle up the moment and stick it on the shelf like a trophy. The purpose is to let the moment out, so that the person’s experience can be felt, so the person can be seen.
The premise of the capstone project of the Management of Technology program at Georgia Tech is that you’re going to “start a business”. You don’t really start a business, but you have to try really really hard to pretend you’re going to start a business. As much as possible, you have to feel that what you’re doing is real and could be something you spend the rest of your life working on. It’s hard. The moment you settle into the right mindset, you remember that you have Econ homework, or kids are asking for your attention, or you have to meet a deadline at work, or, or, or…..
For the record, it’s perfectly fine to have “mere data” as part of your research as well. “I talked to 10 parents and 10 out of 10 said they have moments where they’re completely exasperated as a parent”. That’s a totally fine approach! But sometimes you want to go beyond.
I can’t recall exactly why we didn’t use a call transcription tool. I was talking with a current GT MBA student recently and she had mentioned the professor doesn’t allow it? I can’t remember if that was a rule or not. But if you’re not beholden to that kind of rule and you need to do customer research, I highly recommend a transcription tool.