Practical Empathy

Young separates empathy as a research skill from sympathy and from simply being pleasant, and explains how to build a real understanding of how another person thinks. The core of the book is the listening session, an unstructured conversation aimed at surfacing someone's inner reasoning, reactions and guiding principles rather than their opinions about your product. Later chapters cover developing the ability to listen without steering, analysing what you heard into patterns of thinking, and using that understanding in strategy and in internal work with colleagues. It is short and more concerned with a skill than with a process. Read it before your next round of interviews rather than after.