An empathy map template. Six sections, one buyer, one page.

What the template covers. Six sections around one person.

The empathy map was developed in the mid-2000s at the design consultancy XPLANE, where founder Dave Gray refined an earlier sticky-note workshop exercise into a structured format. It reached a wide audience through the 2010 facilitation playbook Gamestorming, co-authored by Sunni Brown and James Macanufo, and has since been used widely enough that Stanford's d.school and the Nielsen Norman Group both reference versions of it in their own design toolkits.

The template itself is a single page split into six sections, built around one specific person, not a generic "customer": Think and feel (what genuinely matters to them, their worries, their aspirations, rarely what they will say out loud first), Hear (what colleagues, their boss, or industry voices are telling them), See (what they see in their market, their environment, competitors), Say and do (their public attitude and observable behaviour, which often differs from what they privately think), Pain (their fears, frustrations, obstacles), and Gain (what success looks like to them, their own definition of a win).

The distinction between the "say and do" section and the "think and feel" section is the part teams underuse most. A prospect's public position in a sales call ("we're happy with our current process") and their private frustration (the process is actually the reason they took the call) are often two different things, and a good empathy map deliberately captures the gap between the two rather than collapsing them into one line.

Keep the map to a single page per segment. The discipline of forcing every observation into one of six boxes, rather than a long free-form document, is what makes the exercise useful in a live workshop: it forces the team to decide where a piece of evidence actually belongs, and disagreement about that placement is often where the most useful conversation happens.

How to use it. Fill it from evidence, not assumption.

Start with one named segment, not "our customers" in general. A business selling to both a technical evaluator and a commercial decision-maker on the same deal needs two separate maps, because those two people think, feel and decide differently even inside the same sale. Trying to build one map that fits both produces a page too vague to act on.

Pull the raw material from real sources before the workshop: sales call recordings or notes, support tickets, churn interviews, win-loss calls, anything where the actual person, not a marketer's guess about the person, said or did something observable. A team with a genuine backlog of these sources can usually fill a first draft map in 60 to 90 minutes. A team starting from nothing should treat the first pass as a hypothesis and schedule three to five real conversations to check it, rather than presenting assumption as research.

Write each section in the customer's actual words where possible, not a marketing paraphrase. "I don't trust the forecast the sales team gives me" is more useful on a map than "concerned about data accuracy", because the first version is something a salesperson could genuinely say back to the prospect in a call, and the second is something only a strategy deck would say.

Once the map is filled, the pains and gains sections should feed directly into messaging and, further downstream, the wider journey. A well-built empathy map for a specific buyer segment sits naturally upstream of a fuller buyer journey map, since the emotional detail from the empathy exercise is what makes each journey stage specific rather than generic. Our customer journey mapping work typically starts with this exact exercise, one map per key segment, before building out the stage-by-stage journey on top of it.

Run the workshop with a small, cross-functional group, sales, support and product if the business has them, rather than one department alone. A support lead often has direct access to the "pain" section that sales never hears, because customers complain differently to the team that already has their money than to the team still trying to earn it. Combining those perspectives on one page is usually where the exercise produces its sharpest insight.

A worked example. A founder-led B2B sales team maps their operations buyer.

A 20-person B2B software company selling to mid-market operations leaders had a messaging problem: demo-to-close conversion had dropped, and the sales team could not agree why. Rather than guess, the founder pulled ten recent sales call recordings and built an empathy map for their core buyer, a head of operations evaluating a new system.

The "say and do" section captured what the buyer said in calls: "we need something that integrates with what we already have." The "think and feel" section, built from the same calls but reading between the lines, captured something different: this buyer had been burned by a previous system that promised integration and did not deliver, and was privately more worried about being blamed internally for another failed rollout than about the integration itself. The "pain" section made that explicit: fear of championing a second bad decision in front of their own team.

That gap between the stated concern (integration) and the real concern (personal risk from a second failed rollout) reshaped the sales script directly. The team added a specific slide addressing rollout risk and named references from similarly burned buyers, rather than leading with integration features the buyer had already said they wanted. Demo-to-close conversion improved within the following quarter, not because the product changed, but because the pitch finally answered the fear the buyer had never said out loud on a call.