Customer-centricity

One of our apprentices asked me recently: “What’s one good thing and one bad thing that’s changed over your career?” I said I think we have lost connection to, empathy with, and focus on the customer.

When I started as an apprentice analyst programmer (as we were known) c. 1991, the customer wasn’t just at the centre of everything we did, but we worked with them regularly. This customer engagement continued throughout most of my career.

Early in my career, software development felt less about the technology, and more about starting directly with the customer, and working backward to deliver outcomes early, and often. We’d go on site to see how people worked, and to listen to their pain points. Pre-sales was also an opportunity to understand customer needs. Doing customer support meant empathising with their problems, and more often than not turning them into evangelists for our product.

That doesn’t mean we always got it right, of course. Resourcing, prioritisation, and speed of delivery, have always been a challenge. As a software developer, of course I have always liked trying new technology and understanding better practices, etc. At the same time, in my mind at least, it was always a means to an end; not the end itself.

In the past 10-15 years, I’ve experienced a trend I think has been detrimental namely, intermediating cross-functional software development teams from the customer, and spending more time building technology platforms than delivering customer outcomes.

In my role, I am acutely aware of the challenges that come with not operationalising a product and ways of working. Ultimately, if the platform is fragile and hard to maintain, teams will become overwhelmed with rework and will slow down. I don’t think the two need be in opposition.

The more connection development teams have to the customer, the more they can understand their impact (positive and negative), and the more they are empowered to own the relationships, the more they are incentivised to deliver value incrementally while keeping their systems maintainable.

One of the challenges now is we’ve lost this muscle. There are many causes however, a generation (developers, designers, and product managers) has grown up in organisations structured around multiple layers of management, strict delineation between roles, and many degrees of separation from the customer.

We need to nurture a new generation of technology teams to directly engage with customers and value their feedback and needs; break down organisational barriers; encourage cross-functional collaboration; emphasise ruthless iterative and incremental delivery; and take ownership and accountability for customer relationships while ensuring system maintainability.

We need to stop intermediating and genuinely participate in the day-to-day; model how to exploit every challenge as an opportunity to incrementally deliver value; and innovate by ensuring our practices are truly generative and emergent.

Related, I loved this interview with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on why he’s deep in the product details. It resonated with me on a number of fronts, especially the functional org (vs matrix), and the customer focus. He talks about how they organise and coordinate the entire company around a coherent outcome, and the trade-offs of that approach. He also talks a lot about specific customer pain points, how they identified them, and the choices they made when addressing them.