Keep your products close, but your customers closer
According to James Paine at MIT’s System Dynamics Group: every person makes the best decision they can depending on the system they are a part of (1).
I fully agree with this statement and use it a lot to make sense of why we make the decisions we do. But I want to add another layer to it:
“Every person makes the best decision they can depending on the information closest to them”.
This is partly from Matt LeMay’s book Agile for Everybody (2), which is one of the best books I’ve read connecting the customer to agile, where he makes the argument that in an organization the distance-to-the-customer is often much further compared to the distance to their own products. Meaning that when they make decisions the most influential information will be their own product information long before the customer insight has any influence.
Being product centric is therefore only natural because of its closeness to the decision maker and the opportunity is to bring the customer closer.
The job is to reduce the distance-to-the-customer in our organizations, to either make sure every colleague has direct interactions with customers on a regular basis (which is the best option) or that the customer insights is as close to everyone as the product information, or even closer.
With product information close and now channel information increasingly closer, what are the tools we can use to bring the customer as near and as frequently into interactions with everyone in the organization as our product or channel information?
The customer insights needs to be unlocked from its current slow, unscalable, costly and in-frequent formats and be brought to the organization a.) at scale, in real-time, continuously, and b.) through the lens of new questions the organizations needs to ask and serving decisions it needs to make.
Keep your products close, but your customers closer.
Sources:
(1). James Paine, System Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Yp8A7BPE8
(2). Matt LeMay, Agile for everybody, https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/agile-for-everybody/9781492033509/
#customerstrategy #customercentricity #customerinsights #dataandanalytics
