Empathy Map
Use it when you need to align your team around genuine user motivations, pain points, and behaviors.
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What is it?
The Empathy Map is a collaborative workshop tool created by Dave Gray to help teams dig beyond surface‐level user data and uncover the real thoughts, feelings, pains, and gains driving customer behavior.
It breaks down user insight into six key quadrants, Says, Thinks, Does, Feels, Sees, and Hears, plus Pains and Gains. By mapping direct quotes, observed actions, emotional states, environmental influences, and user aspirations, you build a 360° view of your target audience. This framework solves the all-too-common trap of designing off assumptions by forcing you to ground decisions in real user input.
Empathy Maps work at any stage, early discovery, prototype testing, or ongoing research, and scale from solo sprints to cross-functional workshops. If you're hunting for product-market fit or want to prioritize roadmap features based on what truly matters to your users, the Empathy Map gets you there fast.
Why it matters?
Empathy Maps transform scattered user feedback into a unified narrative that drives smarter product decisions, sharper feature prioritization, and more resonant marketing messages. By understanding what users really care about, beyond clicks and pageviews, you reduce churn, boost engagement, and accelerate product-market fit. When everyone's on the same page about user pains and gains, you cut waste, focus development on high-impact areas, and power sustainable growth.
How it works
Growth co-pilot turns your toughest product questions into clear, data-backed recommendations you can act on immediately.
1
Set the Scope
Choose a specific user segment or persona and define the goal, whether it's a new feature, onboarding flow, or retention block.
2
Gather Qualitative Data
Pull in direct quotes from interviews, survey responses, customer support logs, or field observations.
3
Populate Says & Thinks
In the Says quadrant, record verbatim user quotes. In Thinks, capture their unspoken beliefs and motivations.
4
Map Does & Feels
Document real behaviors in Does and chart emotional states, frustrations, joys, in Feels.
5
Add Sees & Hears
Note environmental influences, such as ads, social media, peers (Hears) and visual inputs like UI screens or contexts (Sees).
6
Identify Pains & Gains
Distill the map into core user pains (roadblocks) and gains (aspirations) to spotlight high-leverage opportunities.
7
Synthesize Insights
Look for patterns in the quadrants to form hypotheses and prioritize the next experiments.
Frequently asked questions
Growth co-pilot turns your toughest product questions into clear, data-backed recommendations you can act on immediately.
You've mapped your users' inner worlds, now turn those top pains and gains into high-velocity experiments. Feed your insights into the CrackGrowth diagnostic to uncover hidden friction and launch the tests that move your metrics.