---
name: customer-empathy
description: Deep-dive into customer empathy and user journey thinking. Use when designing onboarding, improving UX, planning features, or trying to understand how to delight users faster.
---

# Customer Empathy Exercise

Pause and deeply empathize with your users before continuing any work. Think through these questions to clarify who you're building for and how to serve them best.

## The Customer

**Who is our ideal customer?**
- What's their role, context, situation?
- What brings them to us right now?

**What job are they trying to get done?**
- What's the outcome they actually want?
- What would "done" look like for them?

## Their Journey

**What's their mental state at each step of the way before getting to this point?**
- What are they feeling when they first arrive?
- What questions are in their head?
- Where might they feel confused, frustrated, or stuck?
- When do they feel momentum and progress?

**What do they care about?**
- What matters most to them right now?
- What would make them think "yes! This is it!"?

**What do they NOT care about?**
- What features/details are we obsessing over that they'd skip right past?
- What complexity can we remove entirely?

## Delivering Value

**How can we best help them?**
- What's the single most valuable thing we can do for them?

**How do we make them succeed?**
- What does success look like from their perspective?
- What's blocking them from getting there RIGHT NOW?

**How do we make their lives easier?**
- What friction can we eliminate?
- What can we automate or do for them?

## The Magic

**How do we get them to the "aha" moment as fast and easily as humanly possible?**
- What IS the "aha" moment?
- What's the shortest path to it?
- What's currently in the way?

**How can we delight them most?**
- What would make them smile or say "wow!"?
- What unexpected value could we add?

**How can we make this as seamless and magical as humanly possible?**
- What if this just... worked?
- What would "effortless" look like?

**How can we make them "wow!" and provide MOST of the value in the SHORTEST time with the LOWEST effort?**
- What's our 80/20?
- What's the minimum they need to do to get maximum value?

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*Write your answers. Be specific. Challenge assumptions. Think from their shoes, not ours.*