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Customer centricity

Your customers are your business therefore, obsessing over them must be at the core of your culture in order to succeed.


Every company claims to be customer-centric. Most aren't. I've watched Fortune 500 companies slap "customer obsession" posters on every wall while their product teams haven't talked to a real customer in months. One SaaS startup I consulted had "customer-first" as its core value, yet its product manager couldn't name its top five customer problems. That's not customer-centricity---that's corporate karaoke.

Real customer-centricity hurts. It means killing your favorite features because customers can't grasp them. It means watching your engineers' faces fall when customer feedback destroys months of work.

I once dismantled a 15-step onboarding wizard that took users 40 minutes to complete. The customer success team swore it was essential. We replaced it with a single page of text and a 'skip' button. Activation rates jumped from 23% to 67% because we stopped treating smart professionals like children who needed their hand held. Sometimes being customer-centric means doing things that make everyone hate you---except the customers.

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