The updated and expanded edition is OUT!
But I need your help... (+ I've got some fun links on AI + customer research)
In this issue:
The updated and expanded edition is out!
Talking AI + customer research on Product Quest Podcast
A great article on AI + customer research from NNGroup
Upcoming talks!
Today is the day!
Without further ado…
The Updated and Expanded edition of Deploy Empathy is now available! 🎉
Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.ca | Amazon.au | Amazon.de
I’ve been thinking about it for years and working on it since last fall, and I’m so incredibly excited to be able to finally share it with you. There are new chapters on using AI with customer research (including some of my go-to prompts) and running your own customer interview workshop, plus more analysis tools with worked examples and much much more.
It also features a new foreword from Jim Kalbach, author of what I consider to be the best Jobs to Be Done book out there, The Jobs to Be Done Playbook. (If you don’t own it, go buy it.) His foreword is so glowing and kind that I literally started crying after the first time I read it. To have one of my product heroes introduce my book is just absolutely wild to me, and I still kinda can’t believe it.
“When I first came across Deploy Empathy, I was jealous. It was the kind of book I wish I had written. The clear and pragmatic approach makes it both fun and useful. The concise writing lets you dip in and out as needed, making it an invaluable reference for customer discovery. It’s a research book for non-researchers.” - Jim Kalbach, author of The Jobs to Be Done Playbook
However, there’s a slight problem…
Amazon won’t transfer any of the nearly-100 customer reviews over to the updated edition. 😭
(Apparently they will only do this for fiction books, not non-fiction.)
This is a problem, as when someone recommends a book to you, what’s the first thing you probably do? Check the reviews—or at least give the stars a glance. A book with no stars and no reviews doesn’t seem very trustworthy.
So the new edition needs reviews… badly.
I therefore have a favor to ask. Even if you already own the first edition, it would be enormously helpful if you could buy and review the new edition. Amazon heavily weights verified-purchase reviews, so to make it easier for you to read and review the new edition, I’m discounting the new edition as low as Amazon will let me.
I’m only going to run this sale for a limited time—until it has a good solid base of reviews, which it hopefully will after a few weeks at this price.
$ | £ | € 9.99 2.99 Kindle
$ | £ | € 19.99 9.99 Paperback
(Note: the price is slightly higher in some markets, such as Canada and Australia, as Amazon has different minimum prices in those markets. Price does not include VAT or sales tax.)
The new edition should also be available via other retail bookstores within the next few days. You can also buy ebook versions directly from me (not discounted).
AI + Customer Research on the Product Quest Podcast
I got to sit down with customer research experts Jonathan Edwards, Scott Burleson and Yann Wermuth and return to their Product Quest Podcast a few weeks ago. We talked about using LLMs as your customer research intern—and also their favorite parts of the book, one of which really surprised me!
Recommended article: “Evaluating AI-Simulated Behavior” from Nielsen-Norman Group
Speaking of AI: I have nothing to do with this article, yet wanted to pass it along as using AI with customer research is the topic on everyone’s minds.
This article looked at studies of three different ways of using AI to simulate participants: two related to digital twins (AI models that attempt to simulate real individual users) and one about synthetic users (AI models that attempt to simulate broader user groups).
The readout? When AI is trained on real survey data and you ask it to guess how a given participant would have responded to a particular question that was included in the training data, it was able to do so with 78% accuracy. But results for when you ask it a question that wasn’t included in the data, they were much less accurate (67%).
For synthetic users, something I find particularly interesting from these studies is that “the standard deviation in the synthetic data was consistently lower than the standard deviation in the human data.” The synthetic users track towards the mean.
I find time and time again that the most useful piece of information from interviews is the unexpected. It’s the sharp, pointy thing that’s so far outside the standard deviation that it barely even qualifies as being in the dataset. That often ends up being the breakthrough insight. And other studies have shown that synthetic users in an interview setting are more likely to try to ‘appease’ the interviewer and tell you what you want to hear than human participants.
Book tour!
I’m embarking on a mini-book tour and may very well be coming to a city near you—or a conference you’ve considered attending. Follow links to buy tickets!
🗣️ Do you run a conference and want to have me speak?
🎧 Do you host a podcast and want to have me on as a guest?
Please get in touch! (You can simply reply to this email.)
🇩🇰 1st of September | Copenhagen + online | “The opportunities and challenges of creating human-centered, AI-accelerated teams” at UX Unite
🇷🇴 10th-11th of September | Bucharest | Friendly.rb
🇹🇷 28th-30th of September | Istanbul | Microconf Europe (psst: they also gave me a fun little bio page—click to see a few recommendations from me!)
🇬🇧 16th of January, 2026 | London | RSVP link forthcoming
Anyway, that’s all for me for now.
I’m so incredibly grateful for everyone’s support over the past four years, and especially the last ten months as I worked on this new edition. It was a real slog at times, and every single time someone posted about the book on Bluesky, X, or Linkedin, posted a review on Amazon or Goodreads, or sent me a nice email, it kept me going. Your support and enthusiasm for this book genuinely mean a lot to me.
Happy interviewing,
Michele
Get your copy of the new edition:
Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.ca | Amazon.com.au | Amazon.de | Amazon.es | Amazon.fr | Amazon.it | Amazon.nl | Amazon.jp | Amazon.in | Amazon.com.mx | Amazon.com.br | direct from me | later this week on other bookstores’ websites!