How do you make an effective empathy map?

Usually, team members explore empathy maps at the beginning of the design & product dev process, after the research has been conducted. After filling in the empathy map, the team experiences customers’ struggles firsthand, causing them to form a stronger connection with users.

If empathy mapping happening for a released product, the most effective way is to make it after user interviews. An empathy map has four quadrants, which account for what the customer says, thinks, does, and feels. So PMMs fill those quadrants after aggregating all user research learnings.