Building empathy in a product team is crucial for maintaining and evolving products in ways that won't negatively impact the user experience. Empathy building activities such as observing research or doing customer support are essential, but often not considered "real work". A good understanding of your customer and their problems is the responsibility of everyone who contributes to ideas about how a product will work. Without empathy, assumptions can be made which are weakened by lack of evidence and increase risk in decision-making. Companies like InVision, Airbnb, Facebook, Fitbit, and Riot Games promote empathy through design tools and experiences that allow team members to understand their customers' needs and behaviors. User research such as observing customer interactions provides the "Lasso of Truth" for product teams, crushing assumptions and reducing risk. Even without direct participation in research, opportunities can be created to build empathy by consuming customer insights, mapping the customer experience, perspective-taking, providing customer support, becoming a customer, exercising empathy, being curious, and always considering the customer's perspective. Building empathy is proactive and should be a continuous effort for product builders to stay up-to-date with their customers' evolving needs and experiences.