Empathy
I will never forget this one part of my AWS onboarding. The instructor showed us this short, animated video by Brené Brown about empathy. It used this characterization of a fox in a hole, and it just clicked for me. The point was that empathy isn't about having the right answer or fixing someone's problem for them. It's about climbing down into the hole and sitting with them for a minute. As Brown says, it's "feeling with people."
In cloud world, we are constantly in the weeds with complex systems and stressed-out customers. It's easy to get lost in the technical puzzle. But that lesson was a constant reminder: the person on the other end of the screen is having a real, human crisis. Sometimes, the most technical thing you can do is to first say, "Wow, that sounds incredibly frustrating. Let's figure this out together."
That early lesson stuck with me. Sure, technical chops are what get the problem solved, but empathy is what makes a customer actually trust you.