customer-empathy
npx machina-cli add skill rameerez/claude-code-startup-skills/customer-empathy --openclawCustomer 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?
Write your answers. Be specific. Challenge assumptions. Think from their shoes, not ours.
Source
git clone https://github.com/rameerez/claude-code-startup-skills/blob/main/skills/customer-empathy/SKILL.mdView on GitHub Overview
The Customer Empathy Exercise guides you to pause and deeply understand your users, clarifying who you’re building for, what job they want done, and their journey. It helps onboarding, UX improvements, and feature planning stay anchored in real user needs, accelerating value and delight.
How This Skill Works
You answer a structured prompts set: identify the ideal customer and their context, define the job they want to get done, map their journey and mental state, note what they care about vs what they don’t, specify how you deliver value and help them succeed, and articulate the aha moment and fastest path to it. These insights drive prioritization, design decisions, and friction removal.
When to Use It
- Designing onboarding experiences that reduce drop-offs and set users up for success
- Improving UX by surfacing pain points, questions, and moments of confusion
- Planning features and roadmap aligned with users' jobs-to-be-done
- Identifying delight opportunities that create quick 'wow' moments for users
- Prioritizing work using the 80/20 rule to deliver maximum value with minimal effort
Quick Start
- Step 1: Pause and define the ideal customer and the job they want to get done
- Step 2: Map the journey and note mental state, questions, and friction at each step
- Step 3: Identify the aha moment and the shortest path to deliver maximum value
Best Practices
- Pause and empathize with users before making design decisions
- Define the ideal customer and the job they’re trying to complete
- Map the user journey, capture feelings, questions, and friction at each step
- Identify the single most valuable action you can deliver for the user
- Define the aha moment and design the shortest path to it
Example Use Cases
- Onboarding a project-management tool by mapping the sign-up to first completed task
- Redesigning a fintech app’s payments flow to reduce support tickets
- Prioritizing features for a collaboration product based on the user’s core job-to-be-done
- Optimizing an e-commerce checkout journey to lower cart abandonment
- Automating common user questions with empathy-informed support flows
