On Customer Obsession

Many companies claim that they are customer obsessed. And that is great. If done correctly, this mindset will lead to the building of great products and services.

However, don’t take this ‘mantra’ too literally or let it be an excuse for your laziness or failure to understand your customers. In the worst case scenario, you’d end up building whatever your customers think they want.

Don’t get me wrong, often times customers know exactly what they need and providing what they want is the optimal option. Other times (especially critical times), building exactly what you are told by your customers would only lead to incremental-and-not-that-useful product improvements.

The reasons are: 1. customers might know what their problems are, but not what the right solutions are. 2. customers do not have visibility of what solutions you could build/provide. You, more than anyone else, are the one that knows what you’ve got up your sleeves. So what you really want to do is to truly understand your customers and invent on behalf of them. This approach would make you serve your customers better and have more fun doing so.

P.S. I use lots of Amazon lingo. After all, Amazon was my first jobs and working there shaped my way of looking at things tremendously.