How to Build Products and Teams with Empathy
Empathy is often misunderstood in the workplace. It’s not about being agreeable or lowering standards - it’s about understanding deeply enough to make better decisions.
For product teams, empathy drives innovation and product-market fit.
For managers, it builds trust, engagement, and performance.
For HR leaders, it shapes systems that sustain culture at scale.
In this fireside conversation, we’ll explore:
Why empathy is a competitive advantage in modern organizations
What empathetic leadership looks like in practice
How to design people systems that reinforce empathy
How to create user-first products designed for people - not just efficiency, and not to replace people, but to genuinely serve their needs
What changes as companies grow, and how to scale these practices
Designed for managers, founders, and HR leaders, this session will offer practical insights, real stories, and actionable takeaways you can apply immediately within your teams and organizations.
Meet Nancy + Cat
Nancy Jeng is the co-founder of Billables AI and a former operator at Pinterest and Google. She builds products and teams with empathy at the center, using AI to solve real-world workflow challenges. A Taiwanese cookbook author and longtime Mariah Carey fan, Nancy believes creativity, curiosity, and clarity are essential to building products and teams that last.
Cat Lee is the founder of Real & Kind, where she works as an executive coach helping founders and leaders practice direct and compassionate leadership. She previously spent over a decade as a consumer tech operator at companies like Facebook and Pinterest, working across growth, product, and culture as those platforms scaled from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of users. Later, as a Partner at Maveron, she backed early-stage consumer founders and also helped build Pace, a Sequoia Capital-backed startup from zero to Series A.