Since there aren't many comments here, I figured that I'd watch the video and summarize.

The speaker is the co-founder of Geocodio (SaaS) and the author of "Deploy Empathy", which is a guide to interviewing customers. They actually have a website here: https://deployempathy.com/

She was a product manager who did customer research, she briefly explains the concept of geocoding, also defined here: https://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/latest/manage-data/geoc...

> Geocoding is the process of transforming a description of a location—such as a pair of coordinates, an address, or a name of a place—to a location on the earth's surface.

She says that people don't quite know how to talk with people and how to approach the common problems: churn, customer acquisition, retention, figuring out what to actually build in the first place. This should be approachable to "deploy empathy" in the workplace.

The interviewer suggests that figuring out what to build is a good idea, you shouldn't always rush to start writing code right away, but sometimes might need to take a step back and plan a bit. The speaker repeats that your APIs and database schemas all need to be suitable for the problem that you want to solve for your users. Think about how it will be used.

In a well run interview, the person that's being interviewed is doing most of the talking, about their process, their goals, to figure out where your product might fit in all that. Don't propose solutions too soon yourself. You need to treat people well and ask questions well to get information out of them, if you're unpleasant, then you won't get out lots of information at all. Show people that you care, don't interrupt them, mirror and summarize what they say.

The interviewer asks about the importance of figuring out the terms and their meanings in their context/domain, much like we do in DDD. For example, what's the difference between "customer" and "subscriber" in any given context, so ask for clarification. Everyone implements things slightly differently.

(a bit of fluff about how different the domains out there are and how some might find it interesting to get a "window" into them and see what they're doing)

The speaker talks a bit about the relevance of geocoding and her product, how coordinates matter for everything from time zones, to political data and environmental risks, how you can get to those from addresses. Some of the biggest problems with that is normalizing data and setting up data pipelines to make things as easy as possible on the user's end.

About interviewing: if you need to talk with "business people", the first question to ask is why they need your help. What are they trying to do, what problem do they need to solve, what have they tried, why isn't it working? The book has a few prepared scripts for this. Go find around 5 people to talk to, try to learn what you can and explore from there.

Keep in mind, that the more nebulous the problem is, the more people you might need to interview. Be prepared to be wrong in your assumptions and to learn something wrong. People often have a problem with recognizing and accepting that they are wrong, egos and whatnot, don't worry about being wrong, build a culture where it's okay to be wrong.

I think that the name "Deploying Empathy" seems like the most attention catching thing here, but what's underneath appears to be just plain old suggestions about things that you should have been doing in the first place. Seems like a pretty reasonable talk, though I'm sure that the companies that should hear this won't, and will keep building stuff their users don't need based on a requirement doc that someone came up with.

Personally, I kind of expected this to be a talk about being kind to your coworkers and building an encouraging environment, but this was focused more on customer research. Either way, talking to people is probably a good skill that has more usefulness than some developers might like to believe (myself in the past included). Oh, also, the GOTO Conferences channel has some pretty good more technical talks as well.