Customer-Centricity

Friday, May 6, 2022

Image Credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/printed-sticky-notes-glued-on-board-zoCDWPuiRuA

Over my 10 years as a product designer, product manager and product leader, I’ve seen one truth hold across industries, e.g., healthcare, retail, telecom, financial services: the most successful products are the ones that solve real customer problems. Yet, many organizations fail to achieve this. They focus on shipping features rather than creating solutions that deliver real value. It’s easy to get caught up in building and launching, but without deeply understanding customer needs, even the most feature-rich products can fall flat.

The challenge is that customer-centricity requires a fundamental shift in how we approach product development. It’s not about checking items off a roadmap or meeting internal deadlines. It’s about genuinely understanding the jobs customers are trying to accomplish and aligning our solutions with those needs.

When teams prioritize features over outcomes, it creates a vicious cycle. I’ve seen this play out many times: leadership pressures teams to deliver on tight timelines—leading to rushed decisions. Features get shipped, but they fail to resonate with customers. Metrics stagnate, and teams scramble to deliver even more features—hoping something will stick.

The root cause of this issue often lies in the way organizations are structured and the incentives they set. Teams are tasked with outputs—what we build and ship—instead of outcomes—what value we deliver to customers.

How might we put customer-centricity into action and solve real problems for our users?

This blog post is a recommendation on how to empower teams to solve problems, embrace continuous customer discovery, understand jobs-to-be-done, and more. I’ll take you through some principles and practices that have consistently worked for me and my teams.

Empower Teams to Solve Problems, Not Build Features

The best product teams I’ve worked with were empowered to focus on solving problems, not just delivering features. Instead of being told what to build, they were given a clear problem statement and the autonomy to explore solutions. This approach fosters creativity and ensures that the team stays laser-focused on the customer.

Real-World Example: At one point, I was part of a team tasked with improving user acquisition & retention for Mayo Clinic’s subscription-based healthtech product. Instead of being handed a list of features to build, I was asked to deeply understand why users churned. Empowered to problem-solve, my task became much more than about shipping features.

Through UX research, we discovered that users struggled with consistently logging their food intake. Users were serious about and dedicated to their health program—obsessing over the accuracy of the data they were logging. This was a case where perfectionism was the root cause of user journey friction—the product became cumbersome because of this obsession.

In this case, the solution to perfectionism was “close enough” is good enough, and done in a semi-automated way—removing any cumbersome user task, while deflecting tendencies for perfectionism. The computer vision & pattern recognition (CVPR) solution had slight flaws in data accuracy, but it was a simpler and more intuitive way of logging food intake that addressed the root problem of perfectionism.

Retention improved significantly as a result of addressing frictions in the user journey. Optimizing CVPR accuracy became a roadmap item. Ultimately, being empowered helped me and my team provide value to subscribers—helping them stay committed to the vision of healthier lives.

Embrace Continuous Customer Discovery and Iterate Quickly with Prototypes

One of the most valuable habits I’ve developed is maintaining regular contact with customers. It’s not enough to conduct research at the beginning of a project and assume you’ve got it all figured out. Needs evolve, and assumptions can quickly become outdated.

I’ve found that the most effective teams set up a rhythm of continuous discovery—weekly customer conversations, usability tests, or quick surveys. This steady flow of feedback helps refine ideas and keeps us grounded in reality.

Another lesson I’ve learned is the power of rapid prototyping. Instead of spending months building a fully-fledged solution, it’s far better to create a lightweight version and test it early. This approach saves time and resources while ensuring that what you build aligns with customer needs.

Real-World Example: When building a new martech collaboration tool for Gap Inc.’s international franchise business, we started with interviews to understand how the Gap Inc. and its franchisees communicated with each other and aligned on seasonal and promotional brand advertising, e.g., in-store, print, traditional media, digital media, activations, and out-of-home.

Just like any “version one” or V1 of any product, there was more to gain from a minimum viable product (MVP) than launching a fully-baked solution. After facilitating a week-long design sprint, we tested a lightweight rapid-prototype, collected feedback, and iterated towards launching V1. The final product looked very different from our initial ideas, but ended with solving the real problem users faced and a roadmap of learning objectives.

Understand the Jobs Customers Are Trying to Do

Customers don’t buy products; they hire them to get a job done. This simple mindset shift has been transformative for me. Instead of asking, “What features should we build?” I now ask, “What job is the customer trying to accomplish?”

By focusing on this, we can uncover pain points that aren’t immediately obvious and design solutions that truly fit into the customer’s life.

Real-World Example: I’ll approach this example a little differently. While building Verizon’s RCS business messaging (RBM) capabilities, we partnered with Google on an AI-powered Google Messages, in order to understand conversation context before recommending RMB partner products & services.

Natural language processing (NLP) has become an essential tool for classifying text into topics. Using this method, we seized opportunities to learn about jobs-to-be-done using NLP, while also extracting additional context based on seasonalities (like holidays), current weather & time, cyclical routines, etc.

AI will play a big part in understanding context, and the jobs-to-be-done along with it. As the old adage goes: context is everything.

Use Data to Inform Decisions

Customer insights are invaluable, but they should be paired with data to guide decisions. Combining qualitative feedback with quantitative analysis helps prioritize efforts and ensures you’re solving the most pressing problems.

Real-World Example: On one of my projects at Verizon, we noticed a high drop-off rate during a BOGO promo checkout flow—a consumer journey that has had constantly evolving business rules and evermore complex third-party partnerships, such as Apple for its AppleCare add-on. Journey analytics pinpointed exactly where the friction occurred—enabling us to redesign the journey, reduce drop-offs, and prepare for even more complex use cases by making adjustments to our infrastructure.

Foster a Culture of Experimentation

Innovation thrives in environments where teams feel safe to experiment and fail. Encouraging small, low-risk experiments allows teams to test ideas, learn from failures, and iterate quickly.

Real-World Example: While modernizing the digital customer experience at American Express, our team adopted modern design patterns that were influenced by Google’s Material Design. Although we pushed the boundaries to be on the bleeding edge, a small experiment to implement web forms with modern design patterns proved to be a learning experience—what is intuitive to leaders in tech, may not be as intuitive to the average user. This learning was validated using a session screen capture tool (which at that time was IBM Tealeaf). Adopting modern design patterns was not necessarily a bad idea, but rather an idea ahead of its time.

Align Around a Shared Vision

A clear product vision is the cornerstone of customer-centricity. It provides a unifying direction and ensures that every decision aligns with the broader mission. The best teams I’ve worked with were guided by a vision that was both inspiring and actionable.

Real-World Example: At one point, I worked on a project at Nasdaq with a vision to integrate two industry-leading B2B tools and still serve two distinct segments of users. This north star informed every decision, from the features we prioritized to balancing ease-of-use with the ability to highly-customize investor relations websites.

The result was a product that resonated deeply with its users, while Nasdaq (with its then-recent acquisition of Thomson Reuters’ investor relations platforms) defended its leadership position in this B2B fintech space.

Invest in Talent and Collaboration

Customer-centricity is a team sport. It requires collaboration across disciplines—product, design, engineering, marketing, and beyond. It also requires hiring and nurturing talent that values curiosity, empathy, and problem-solving.

Real-World Example: One of the most successful teams I led was composed of diverse skill sets and perspectives. When I was with American Express, the company invested in agile transformation consulting from Deloitte, mandated professional development (via Scrum Alliance certifications), and created a culture of mutual respect—enabling us to tackle complex problems creatively, effectively, and at scale.

Simply, this investment and commitment to Team Amex equipped teams to unify our ways-of-working, speak the same language, and become agile in our continuous discovery & delivery across many swimlanes.

Conclusion: Put Customers at the Center

Becoming truly customer-centric is a journey, not a destination. It requires consistent habits, strong leadership, and a relentless focus on understanding & solving customer problems. The rewards, however, are immense: loyal customers, differentiated products, and sustainable growth.

As product managers, we have the privilege—and the responsibility—of championing the customer in everything we do. By empowering teams, embracing discovery, and staying outcome-focused, we can build products that don’t just succeed in the market but genuinely improve people’s lives.

Let’s solve real problems, not just ship features. That’s where the magic happens.

Ready to put customer-centricity into action and solve real problems for your users? Schedule a free 30-minute exploratory call today to discuss how we can transform your product strategy and drive meaningful outcomes.