Empathy is an overlooked technical skill that is vital to the health and resiliency of both teams and code bases. Surveys such as Businessolver's State of Empathy Report consistently find over 90% of CEOs and employees think empathy is important for business, and research from MIT shows that a toxic culture that lacks empathy is 10.4 times more likely to be the reason someone quits their job than compensation. Empathy even matters when it comes to code quality. But, wait! If empathy is so important, why is it missing as an applied technical skill? According to Andrea Goulet, Co-Founder of Heartware and author of Empathy-Driven Software Development, it's because we're not thinking about empathy in the right way. Our culture may teach us that empathy is a fluffy feeling and a fixed trait, but research is showing that empathy is actually a set of skills that you can develop and grow with practice. In this presentation, Andrea walks through how you can use your existing understanding of software system architecture to grow the empathy skills for yourself and your team. She'll review specific and concrete practices that are relevant in the context of creating software, and help you take empathy from the abstract into the practical and implementable behaviors that will help you communicate better, build trust, and even write better code.