Olivia: Jackson, what is the single most boring object in your house? Jackson: Oh, that's a fierce competition. I'm looking at a stapler that has seen better days. But I think the winner has to be the thermostat. It’s this beige plastic box of quiet disappointment on the wall. I only ever interact with it when I'm already uncomfortable. Olivia: That beige box of disappointment is the perfect place to start. Because what if I told you that a company reinvented that exact object, and in doing so, unlocked a 3.2-billion-dollar secret about product design? And it all starts with a single, surprising feeling a reviewer had: 'startling joy'. Jackson: Hold on. 'Startling joy' from a thermostat? That sounds like some serious marketing fluff. Who feels joy from adjusting the temperature? It’s a utility. You want it to work, and then you want it to be invisible. Olivia: That's what everyone thought! And that's the central idea in Jon Kolko's fantastic book, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love. He argues that the best products don't just work; they connect with us on an emotional level. Jackson: And Kolko isn't just some philosopher thinking big thoughts, right? I looked him up. This guy was a principal designer at frog design, a VP at Blackboard... he's been in the trenches of building actual stuff for years. Olivia: Exactly. He wrote this book to bridge that massive gap between the engineers who are building things and the real, messy, emotional people who have to use them. And that feeling of 'startling joy' from the Nest thermostat wasn't an accident. It was the result of a quiet revolution in how we think about making things.

Jackson: Okay, so unpack this 'revolution' for me. What was so different about how Nest designed a thermostat? Olivia: Well, think about the old way of making products, especially in big companies. It often started with something called a Product Requirements Document, or PRD. It's a massive document, sometimes hundreds of pages long, listing every single feature the product must have. Jackson: I'm falling asleep just hearing the name. It sounds like a recipe for endless meetings and arguments over bullet points. Olivia: It is! It leads to products that are bloated, complicated, and frankly, have no soul. The team is just checking off a list. Nest, along with companies like Square and Airbnb, flipped the script. They didn't start by asking "What features should it have?" They started by asking "How should this make you feel?" Jackson: And how is a thermostat supposed to make you feel? Olivia: Smart. In control. Cared for. The Nest thermostat learned your schedule automatically. After a few days, it knew when you liked the house warm and when you were away. When you left the house, it would show a little green leaf to let you know you were saving energy. It wasn't just a tool; it was a partner. It had a sleek, beautiful design that felt more like a high-end gadget than a piece of utility hardware. It made people feel good about their home and their choices. That's where the 'startling joy' came from—the surprise that a mundane object could be so intuitive and thoughtful. Jackson: Okay, I can see that with Nest. And with Square, making it incredibly simple to take a payment, or Airbnb, making you feel like you belong in a new city. But these are the usual suspects, the tech darlings. Does this empathy thing really work for, I don't know, laundry detergent? Or something less glamorous? Olivia: That is the perfect question, because it gets to the heart of Kolko's argument. This isn't a 'tech' strategy; it's a 'human' strategy. And he would point to a classic example: the Swiffer. Jackson: The floor duster? Olivia: The very same. Procter & Gamble, a massive, traditional company, didn't create the Swiffer by writing a PRD for a better mop. Their researchers did something radical: they went into people's homes and just watched them clean. Jackson: That sounds a little creepy. Olivia: A little! But it was incredibly insightful. They saw people doing this weird thing: after cleaning, they'd take a used dryer sheet or a paper towel, stick it on the end of a broom, and do a final sweep of the floor to pick up lingering dust and hair. Jackson: Huh. Why were they doing that? Olivia: Because their mops and brooms weren't getting the job done. They had this deep, unspoken need for a floor that felt perfectly, completely clean. It wasn't about the function of mopping; it was about the feeling of satisfaction and relief from a truly dust-free hardwood floor. The Swiffer was born directly from that empathetic observation. It was a product designed to deliver a feeling. Jackson: Wow. So they weren't selling a cleaning tool, they were selling the feeling of 'ahhh, it's finally clean.' That makes a lot of sense. It reframes the whole problem. Olivia: Precisely. And that's the empathy revolution in a nutshell. It’s about discovering what people are trying to feel, not just what they're trying to do.

Jackson: Okay, I'm sold on the 'why'—empathy leads to better, more successful products. But the 'how' still feels a bit fuzzy. You can't just ask people in a focus group, "What deep, unspoken emotional needs do you have about floor care?" They'd look at you like you have three heads. Olivia: You are absolutely right. People are notoriously bad at articulating their own needs. If you'd asked people in the 19th century what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse, not a car. This is where Kolko's process gets really practical. It’s about deep observation, or what designers call ethnographic research. Jackson: That sounds academic and expensive. Olivia: It can be, but the principle is simple: watch what people do, not what they say. Kolko tells this fantastic story in the book about a product manager, let's call him Joe, who was tasked with building a new health and wellness app for a startup called LiveWell. Jackson: Another health app. The world definitely needs more of those. Olivia: (laughs) Right? So Joe's initial idea, his assumption, was that people wanted to track their physical health meticulously. They'd want to log their workouts, their calories, their weight. And he thought a great place to observe this behavior would be a structured environment like a yoga studio. Jackson: Makes sense. People in yoga pants with notebooks, tracking their progress. Olivia: That's what he thought. So he and his marketing chief go to a yoga class, not to participate, but just to observe. And what they saw completely shattered their assumptions. Before the class even started, they witnessed the yoga instructor calmly talking a participant through the beginning of a panic attack. Jackson: Whoa. That's not what you expect to see. Olivia: Not at all. And after the class, the conversations among the participants weren't about their poses or how many calories they burned. They were talking about their stressful jobs, about managing anxiety, about trying to find a moment of peace in their chaotic lives. No one pulled out a notebook to log their physical data. The entire ecosystem was centered on mental and emotional well-being. Jackson: So Joe went in looking for data-trackers and found people just trying to hold it together. Olivia: Exactly. He realized the product people needed wasn't another tool to quantify their bodies. It was a tool to help them understand and manage their emotional state. His entire product vision pivoted in that moment, from the physical to the emotional, all because he observed what was really happening. Jackson: That's a powerful story. But it also feels... a little lucky. He happened to be there on the day someone had a panic attack. Some readers have pointed out that while the book is inspiring, it can feel more philosophical than a practical 'how-to' guide. Does Kolko give a framework for a team that doesn't have weeks to just hang out at yoga studios waiting for an epiphany? Olivia: He does, and it's a fair critique that the book is more about the 'why' than a step-by-step manual. But he does provide a path. He talks about creating 'synthesis walls'—literally covering a wall with photos, quotes, and observations from your research. You're not looking for one single 'aha!' moment. You're looking for patterns, contradictions, and anomalies. Jackson: So it's about making the data visual and tangible. Olivia: Yes, and then you work to extract what he calls 'provocative statements of truth' about human behavior. For Joe, the statement might have been: "People are more concerned with managing their daily anxiety than they are with tracking their physical performance." That single insight is gold. It becomes the filter for every feature you decide to build or, just as importantly, not build. The key isn't the amount of time you spend, but the quality of your attention.

Jackson: Okay, so you've done the research, you've found this 'behavioral gold.' You have your provocative statement of truth. How do you protect that insight? How do you stop it from getting watered down and turned into just another feature on a roadmap by an engineering team that has a deadline next Friday? Olivia: This is where Kolko introduces his most powerful and, I think, beautiful metaphor. He says the product leader's role is not to be an engineer, but to be a shepherd. Jackson: A shepherd. What does that even mean in a tech company? Olivia: Think about it. An engineer builds a bridge. They have a blueprint, they know the exact destination, and their job is to get there as efficiently as possible. A shepherd, on the other hand, guides a flock through a complex, ever-changing landscape. They don't have a map to a fixed point. They have a set of principles—find water, avoid predators, keep the flock together—and they guide the group based on those principles. Jackson: So the product manager's job isn't to hand over a blueprint of features, but to communicate a set of guiding principles? Olivia: Precisely. Look at Tumblr. David Karp, the founder, had a core principle: "This is a positive place for self-expression. We don't want people to feel bad." That's not a feature. It's a feeling. And it led to concrete product decisions. No public follower counts, so you don't feel unpopular. No direct, nasty comments on your posts. The product's soul was built around that principle. Jackson: And the community can become part of that shepherding process. Olivia: Yes! That's the other half of it. The shepherd pays attention to the flock. Think about Twitter. The users invented the @-reply to talk to each other. They invented the hashtag to group conversations. The company didn't engineer those features from on high. They saw the emergent behavior of their community and shepherded it into the core product. They built paths where the flock was already walking. Jackson: But that shepherding can go wrong, can't it? I'm thinking of Apple's Power Mac G4 Cube from the year 2000. It was beautiful, an absolute work of art. Steve Jobs had a vision, a principle of aesthetic perfection. And it was a massive commercial failure. It sold so poorly they pulled it after just one year. Where was the empathy there? Olivia: That is the perfect counter-example, and it highlights the risk Kolko acknowledges. Empathy and a strong vision reduce risk, but they don't eliminate it. The G4 Cube was a failure of what Kolko calls product-market fit. It was a beautiful object that solved a problem nobody actually had. It was too expensive for consumers and not expandable enough for pros. Jackson: So the shepherd had a beautiful vision for the landscape, but the flock had no reason to go there. Olivia: Exactly. The product manager's job is to hold both in their head at once: the deep, empathetic insight about what people need, and the cold, hard signals from the market about what they're willing to adopt. The G4 Cube was an intuitive leap without the grounding of real user need. It was art, but it wasn't a well-designed product.

Olivia: So when you pull all these threads together, Kolko's message is that building a great product isn't a linear, mechanical process of adding features from a checklist. It's a deeply human cycle of observing, feeling, and then guiding. Jackson: It’s about shifting your entire mindset from a checklist of 'what it does' to a clear story of 'how it makes you feel.' And that's not just for venture-backed startups in Silicon Valley. It's for anyone making anything for another human being, whether it's an app, a floor duster, or a city service. Olivia: That's the big takeaway. Empathy isn't a 'soft skill' that's nice to have. In the modern economy, it's a core strategic competency. It's the most direct and reliable path to discovering what people truly need, long before they can even articulate it themselves. Jackson: It's almost like a superpower. The ability to see the invisible needs that are all around us. So for everyone listening, maybe the challenge this week isn't to think about your customer or your user in the abstract. It's to try and feel what they're feeling. What's one tiny, persistent frustration in their day that you could make disappear? The next billion-dollar idea might be hiding right there. Olivia: I love that. And we'd love to hear your thoughts. What's a product you use that you feel truly 'gets' you, that feels like it was designed with real empathy? Find us on our social channels and let us know. Jackson: Your insights always make our community smarter. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.