Empty Chair Method

Most product decisions involve at least one stakeholder who isn't in the room — the customer, the future PM who'll inherit this, the engineer on call next quarter, the compliance team who didn't send a representative, the regulator, the user segment currently producing zero revenue but significant future risk.

Absent stakeholders get systematically under-weighted for the most human reason: nobody in the meeting is spending political capital on their behalf.

The Empty Chair Method is the practice of explicitly naming one absent perspective at the start of the meeting and giving someone — rotating, ideally — the job of speaking for it. The practice sounds theatrical and works anyway, because giving a perspective a physical placeholder (a chair, a sticky note, a line in the doc) forces the room to argue past it instead of around it.

The anti-pattern is 'the customer wouldn't want this' said in passing. That's rhetoric, not procedure. The real version is: 'Sam, you're the customer in today's meeting. When we say the new flow "streamlines things", what does that mean for the user with dyslexia who needs more time on each step?'

The account-deletion redesign. A team is redesigning the account-deletion flow. Present: the PM, two engineers, a designer, a lawyer, a support lead. The design direction is to collapse the current three-screen 'are you sure?' journey into a single screen with one checkbox, which tests well with the eight users in the moderated session. Partway through the meeting the PM remembers to do the empty-chair exercise and nominates the support lead to speak for 'the user who wants to come back in six months'. The support lead, playing that role, notes that the current flow produces a specific email trail that their team uses to restore accounts after the 30-day grace period — a flow that generates roughly 180 restorations a month, each worth somewhere between 'one retained user' and 'a ten-thousand-pound portfolio that would otherwise transfer out'. The collapsed single-screen version loses the email trail. The redesign is salvageable with ten extra minutes of work; without the empty chair, it would have shipped cleanly and the support team would have found out about the problem in week two.

Amazon's S-team customer chair. The most famous empty-chair discipline is Amazon's S-team meetings, where the chair was reportedly labelled 'the most important person in the room' and every decision had to pass the 'would this make the customer sitting there happy?' test. The device is gimmicky. It works anyway — because naming the absent party procedurally, rather than rhetorically, is what stops the room from quietly overruling them. Rhetorical invocations are cheap. A chair with a nameplate is cheap too, but it's a prop you have to argue around, not past.