📖 Book
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Paid
Intermediate
Why we picked it Judging whether people will actually change their behavior comes down to how well you can hear intensity in what they say, and this is the most practical book on doing exactly that. Hansen, a bootstrapped SaaS founder, walks through the specific questions and listening moves that get past polite answers to the real emotional weight behind a stated problem. It is the how-to that makes the vitamin versus painkiller judgment something you can actually do in a live conversation instead of guessing.
Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers
From deployempathy.com by Michele Hansen Full book, roughly 250 pages
- Ask about the last time someone hit the problem and what they did about it; workarounds and effort reveal true intensity better than a rating of how much it bothers them.
- People soften and rationalize their pain, so listen for emotion, hesitation, and the stuff they already spend money or time on to cope.
- Behavior in the past is the honest signal, if they never built a workaround or paid to escape it, the problem is likely a nice-to-have.