16. Anchor everything on meeting customer needs

Happy New Year!

One of the hardest things to avoid in tech is becoming so inwardly fixated on your product, its features, the future roadmap and how you stack up against the competition that you begin to lose sight of why it exists in the first place. Instead of viewing the world through the lens of serving customer needs, the product slowly and often imperceptibly becomes the raison d'être.

It is a balancing act, but when you spend most of your working day thinking about and talking about your product or internal business issues, it’s just inevitable that over time, the scales can become unbalanced and then product decisions and priorities quietly begin to self-justify in a vacuum. If left unchecked, your focus can drift so far off course that new product features or decisions about direction start to proliferate independently of what the market needs or wants, and weight shifts to speculatively building products or features first before figuring out whether anyone will want them.

You may be able to vigorously convince yourself and colleagues inside your reality bubble that you’re working on a killer product strategy or plan, but without validation or being grounded in the reality of what customers need, this can be a futile and even dangerous path.

One simple fix is to ensure that you set a hard operational priority to continuously recentre your focus on meeting customer needs. This might be achieved by blocking out time in advance for regular customer visits and check-ins once or twice a month or hosting customer advocate group meetings.

Whatever you do, you must hardwire it into your calendar and those of your team because even when you set out with good intent, the gravitational pull of business as usual will slowly creep back into your calendar and your everyday thinking. So, you need to be alert to the risk of this happening and consciously resist the temptation to cancel planned customer visits because something more pressing has just emerged internally.

Not engaging with customers regularly should be your and your team’s canary in the coal mine.

Regards,
GT

Bonus: It’s worth watching this fantastic clip that captures Steve Jobs at a critical moment, just a few weeks after returning to save Apple in 1997. While Apple remained on life support precisely because it had lost touch with meeting customer needs, Jobs was confronted by a hostile audience of Apple developers who were pissed off that he decided to kill some promising products, and where Jobs talks about the importance of approaching product design and focus from a customer-first perspective. I reckon history proves his point.