For many customers, using a new product for the first time can be a daunting task.
Engineers at Google Cloud realized this because they use many of its products themselves. They can make it easier on themselves because they have access to additional Google tools and documentation.
So in June, 2016, the company started holding what it calls "customer empathy sessions."
Google Cloud has long had an engineering-focused culture. But in the past few years, as it worked to catch up to rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, it has invested heavily in being easier to work with for large enterprise businesses, especially those outside the tech sector.
These customer empathy sessions were designed to help with that.
"When I joined Google, we needed to get better at meeting people where they are," Kelsey Hightower, principal engineer at Google, told Insider. "That was the idea behind these empathy sessions."
This realization arose as products like Google's managed Kubernetes service quickly became popular. Kubernetes is an open source cloud project Google developed to help scale its massive search applications. It's become widely used among most of the Fortune 500 for all sorts of uses.
But for customers who have never used a particular cloud technology before, it can be tough to learn, or to figure out how to use multiple products together, such as connecting a Kubernetes application to a Google Cloud database.
"As simple as that sounds, there's a lot of friction, especially in the cloud when you want to not compromise security," Hightower said. "Asking someone to do that for the first time can be daunting."
So Google Cloud engineers must now test products by doing tasks without using any of Google's internal automation tools or internal documentation. In other words, they have to use the product in the same way customers would.
"When you have good technology, you can fall into this trap of assuming it just works," Hightower said.
Engineers will write down every Google search they did, what worked, and what didn't work. At the end of those empathy sessions, each team will present its findings and what to do about it.
Generally, engineers found they can solve many customer problems just by offering clearer, more helpful documentation, Hightower said. For example, when Google's Cloud Code team held a customer empathy session, the engineers found it wasn't easy to install. So they went back and fixed the onboarding process.
"We can improve our documentation," Chen Goldberg, vice president of engineering at Google, told Insider. "We can improve details. There are more things we can do to create a better experience. When we're doing it together, it's a safer environment."
These customer empathy sessions have become a part of Google Cloud's development process, and now, different teams within the company hold such sessions multiple times a month.
"Empathy engineering is a very humbling experience," Goldberg said. "We need to learn from our customers and our partners because we acknowledge we don't have all the answers. Some answers will come from the team, some will come from customers."
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