I learned it young. Not by choice. By necessity.
New school almost every other year. New building, new kids, new unspoken rules to decode before somebody decided what you were. You learn fast when you have to. Who leads. Who follows. Who needs to feel heard before they’ll trust you. Who’s performing confidence and who actually has it. What the room says it needs versus what it actually needs.
Nobody called that a skill. It was just survival.
But survival, practiced long enough, becomes instinct. And instinct, applied with intention, becomes design.
Here’s what I know about empathy that nobody puts in a job description.
It’s not soft. It’s not a personality trait or a bonus quality you bring to team meetings. It’s the most technical skill a designer can have. Because you cannot build for people you don’t actually see. You can guess. You can assume. You can build something beautiful that solves the wrong problem elegantly and call it done.
Or you can read the room.
In every project, in every stakeholder meeting, in every moment where the feedback doesn’t quite make sense on the surface, there is a real person underneath saying something they don’t have the language for yet. The client who says I don’t like it usually means I don’t trust it yet. The user who abandons the flow isn’t being difficult. They hit a wall the designer never tested for because the designer never imagined being them.
I imagine being them. Every time. That’s not a technique I learned. It’s something I’ve been doing since I was seven years old in a new city trying to figure out where I fit.
It shows up in the small moments.
The phone call I made to Mecklenburg County when a broken portal was costing my whole team time. I didn’t document the friction and move on. I called, got clarity, and brought it back so nobody else had to figure it out alone. That’s empathy as operational design. Seeing the problem, yes. But also seeing the people stuck inside it.
The whiteboard at the huddle nobody was using until someone stepped up and made it make sense. Not for credit. For clarity. Because a team that can see the full picture moves differently than a team guessing in the dark.
The sticky note that looks random today but will be exactly what someone needs eight months from now. Even future me is a user I’m designing for.
This is the thing about growing up between Chicago and Elkhart. Between big and fast and loud, and quiet and specific and close to the ground.
Chicago taught me scale. How to see the whole system. How to move through something large without losing your place in it.
Elkhart taught me depth. How to see the single human moment inside the larger one. How to notice what’s missing before anyone names it.
Between the two I learned to zoom in and zoom out without thinking about it. To hold the thirty thousand foot view and the ground level truth at the same time.
That’s not a design methodology. That’s a life I lived.
I never met a room I couldn’t read.
Not the classroom in a new school where I had three days to figure out who was who. Not the boardroom where everyone was speaking a different language and nobody was translating. Not the broken system that needed someone to pick up the phone instead of waiting for a guide that wasn’t coming. Not the community center where kids from different schools and different lives all showed up and somehow found common ground over popcorn and basketball tournaments, city funded programs, and thirty minutes of homework first.
Every one of those rooms taught me something. And every one of those lessons lives in the work I build now.
Empathy isn’t a soft skill.
It’s the foundation everything else is built on. And if you’ve spent your whole life practicing it without knowing that’s what you were doing, you are more prepared than you think.
Read the room. Build for the person in it.
That’s the whole job. And some of us have been doing it our whole lives.
Whitney Cullens is a product designer who has always known that the most important tool in the room is the ability to truly see the person across from you.