Empathy, Observing & BIG Ideas By Simon Troup
Whether it’s writing an entry for the SBS BIG writing competition, or for the amazing 100 BIG ideas initiative in student enterprise, the key skills for having great product ideas are being empathetic and observant in order to discover problems. In this blog we’ll do a quick summary of what I mean to be empathetic to problems, and dive a bit deeper into productivity hacks that widen the net of observable opportunities.
Empathy
If you ever meet a tech product manager, one of the most important skills is customer empathy. That is the ability from the outside to understand a customer experience or pain point. They are problem centred, not selling a solution until they fully understand the problem, and have been able to articulate it in a clear problem statement or user story. BIG ideas need to have impact and having empathy for a demographic community, a customer segment or user persona gets you a long way. Empathy starts with being able to listen and hear the truth. Folks interested in product management careers should check out the amazing pocket sized book “the mom test” https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/dp/1492180742 . It will help you conduct interviews that reveal the truth about a user or business pain point.
Don’t forget, empathy is a human capability, but to communicate your idea that solves a problem we must be able to frame it in an easy and understandable way. Choose your toolkit for framing problems, some are listed below. Search these terms and you’ll find resources all over the web to help you sharpen the way you capture a problem in words.
Problem Statements – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_statement
Jobs-To-Be-Done – https://jobs-to-be-done.com/what-is-jobs-to-be-done-fea59c8e39eb
User-Stories – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_story
interested in perspectives on the financial markets, tech, innovation, startups – all the cool stuff we want to learn about. Also check out the pages of leading business schools such as MIT Sloan, Stanford, Chicago Booth etc who often take a wider societal approach.
Awesome Lists
In the past I’ve called these ‘awesome lists’ https://github.com/topics/awesome , and apologies for broken links that leak in over time! And of course these are examples, just find the top investment, consulting, accounting firms, or any firm in any sector and find their insights pages. There are MANY more than those below.
Business Schools Awesome List
- https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter
- https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review
- https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights
Capital Markets Awesome List
- https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/
- https://www.ib.barclays/our-insights.html
- https://www.natwest.com/corporates/insights.html
Investments Awesome List
- https://am.jpmorgan.com/gb/en/asset-management/per/insights/
- https://www.morganstanley.com/im/en-gb/intermediary-investor/insights.html
- https://www.blackrock.com/uk/solutions/insights
- https://www.ubs.com/global/en/assetmanagement/insights.html
- https://think.ing.com/
- https://www.allspringglobal.com/insights/
- https://professionals.fidelity.co.uk/perspectives/investment-insight
- https://www.orbis.com/uk/individual/insights/insights
- https://www.merrilledge.com/research/perspectives
- https://www.privatebanking.hsbc.com/wih/
- https://www.privatebank.citibank.com/insights
- https://www.deutschewealth.com/en/insights.html
Consulting Awesome List
- https://www.accenture.com/nl-en
- https://www.bain.com/insights/
- https://www.bcg.com/publications
- https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights
- https://www.oliverwyman.com/our-expertise/insights.html
- https://kpmg.com/xx/en/home/insights.html
- https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights.html
- https://www.ey.com/en_gl/insights
- https://www.pwc.co.uk/insights.html
- https://www.capco.com/en/Intelligence
- https://www.publicissapient.com/insights
What Next?
Step 1: Follow companies and top business schools via LinkedIn and other social media.
Step 2: Develop a personal hack to capture good ideas in a note on your phone or similar. My hack is to ‘share’ via my mobile chrome or app to my soton.ac.uk email app, send to myself, and have an outlook rule to drop all emails from myself to a “notes-to-self” folder.
Step 3: Set time aside to filter these ideas, drop some and climb into others.
Step 4: Homebrew some ideas, talk them through with peers, iterate and validate
Step 5: Take action! Write a (short please!) LinkedIn post, a blog post for SBS AOB page, go to ENACTUS to pitch a social enterprise idea, perhaps even found a startup for the Future Worlds bootcamp.
Good luck – happy ideating, and if you still need some inspiration check out the enterprise matters blogs on unbundling fintech, data ethics and climate transition investing (links below).