The Empathy Advantage

We talk about empathy as if it lived in a different building from the engineering org. A nice-to-have. A thing you do after the real work.

But the most expensive failures I've watched were never failures of intellect. They were failures of attention — a quiet concern nobody surfaced, a user we never actually watched, a teammate who stopped raising their hand.

Empathy, done seriously, is a discipline. It's the habit of asking one more question before you commit to the answer. And it compounds, the same way good architecture does.