Empathy and Product Management
Source: https://www.bringthedonuts.com/newsletter/empathy-and-product-management.html ↗
Ken Norton spent a decade running product at Google Ventures and writes one of the more humane newsletters in the product management space.
This piece is about empathy as a working practice — not a posture but a set of specific moves PMs make in meetings, in customer conversations, in decisions about what to prioritise.
Norton connects empathy to a craft of product management that he argues has been hollowed out by process and metrics.
Short, concrete, worth sharing with new PMs.
The broader blog is worth subscribing to as a thoughtful complement to the more breathless product commentary elsewhere.
Central argument
Norton argues that empathy in product management has been reduced to a buzzword while the actual practice has atrophied — replaced by dashboards, frameworks, and process theater. His central claim is that empathy is not an attitude or a personality trait but a set of concrete, learnable moves: how you listen in a customer conversation, how you represent user needs in a prioritization meeting, how you push back on decisions that sacrifice user welfare for short-term metrics. The essay positions empathy as the core craft competency that distinguishes product managers who build things people actually want from those who merely execute roadmaps.
Critique
The essay's framing risks romanticizing empathy as a corrective to process without fully reckoning with the structural conditions that erode it — quarterly OKRs, understaffed research functions, and organizational incentives that reward shipping over understanding. Norton writes from the vantage point of someone who operated with unusual autonomy at Google Ventures; the prescription to 'do the empathetic thing' may be harder to follow for PMs embedded in large enterprises where empathy competes directly with compliance, velocity targets, and stakeholder politics. A sharper argument would address how to sustain empathetic practice under those constraints, not just make the case that it matters.
Why it matters for product
For a CPO setting the tone for how product teams operate, the essay offers a useful diagnostic: if discovery is being run as a checkbox before development rather than a genuine inquiry, that is the hollowing-out Norton describes. The argument also has direct implications for how senior PMs are evaluated — if empathy is a craft practice rather than a disposition, it can be coached, observed in decision-making, and built into team rituals like how customer feedback is surfaced in roadmap reviews, making it an organizational design lever rather than a hiring filter.