By Nancy Perry (opens in new tab)
Image credit: iStock
For the past 5 years or so, I focused on understanding what it means to have a customer-driven culture and how we can shift our language and behavior to build experiences that center around the needs, motivations, and problems of real people. I was on the initial driving team of our “Human Centered Culture” work here at Microsoft – which later evolved into a key company program.
Over that time, we learned a lot about blockers to customer obsession, and what behaviors we see in teams and individuals that ultimately lead to a more empathetic, customer-driven organization. From research conducted across our organization, it boiled down to two key themes: 1) leaders modeling customer-driven behaviors and 2) teams building customer-driven behaviors into their current processes and how they work. Based on these themes, we then developed principles and practices to encourage customer-driven behaviors within our org, which I’ve outlined below.
1. Teams that are more customer driven have leaders modeling and supporting key customer-driven behaviors.
- Leaders share customer learnings often. Customer-focused leaders talk with customers directly whenever possible, and some have ongoing customer relationships (or “buddies”). When leaders bring these customer stories back to share with our organization, they model the behavior and inspire action in others. In our org, one team even described a leader who was “willing to be in the trenches” 20 hours-a-day with the team (during COVID), jump on customer calls, understand the issues around customers, and use their influence to advocate for the customer. Most importantly, these leaders highlighted not only customer success but their learnings from customer stories (even if a feature failed) and where their assumptions were challenged.
- Leaders ask customer-focused questions. Customer-focused leaders consistently ask customer-centric questions during reviews and meetings. They push for understanding and documenting of the underlying customer problem, as well as customer data and insights to back up new features. At reviews, they ask “What’s the problem here and how did you know it’s a problem? Is this the best solution? Does it solve the customer problem? What else did you test?” When these leaders model customer-focused questions, it becomes a part of culture that everyone ask (and expect) these customer-focused questions.
- Leaders celebrate customer impact and learning more than shipping features. In many orgs, teams tend to celebrate the things that start rolling out the door or when they reach 100%, but spend less time on whether they solved the customer problem or whether there is more work to be done. It’s important to celebrate customer learnings as well, even if we learn that we don’t have the right problem or that we shouldn’t ship. Nonetheless, while there is still a general urgency to ship, and often a reluctance to give up on something with so much investment, we are now seeing more leaders ‘celebrate the pivot’, or ‘hold ship’ to ensure customer quality before committing to shipping. We need leaders who demonstrate curiosity and are open to having their assumptions about customers challenged. And, we need everyone to be committed to a growth mindset around their assumptions being challenged as well.
2. Teams that are are more customer driven tend to have specific customer-focused processes operationalized into the ways they build products and run the business.
- Teams make it just “part of the job”. Teams and individuals benefit when they have an ongoing curiosity about customers and talk with them often. Seeking out opportunities to learn from customers is part of the job for all roles, not an extracurricular activity. We are all “product people” who benefit by interacting with customers across the product lifecycle – customer-driven is a team sport! And interpreting customer insights together also helps us mitigate bias.
- Teams leverage customer-first language. More customer-driven orgs have shifted from tech-first to customer-first language. These teams are explicit about user needs, assumptions, and hypotheses up front… and iteratively test them with customers. They ask questions to deeply understand the user problem before determining solutions and writing code. And they don’t just talk to customers at the beginning – they make sure to talk with them throughout the lifecycle and that the right customer questions are asked at the right time. Below is an example of how our organization visualized what customer questions to ask and when:
- Teams measure not only business outcomes but customer outcomes. We want to change behavior and delight our customers (opens in new tab). And of course, get more users and make money. We may care about monthly active users (MAU) to gauge the health of our business, but customer usage isn’t always success. We also need to think about the question, “How will we know we are successful?” Starting with the customer outcomes can be a great way to center on the user goals and value. And don’t forget that customer perception is king. Customer perceptions are reality (to your customers). Customer perceptions drive sales. Customer perceptions are ultimately our brand’s image. One of our leaders has consistently asked us, “How do we know our users love our product?” So how do we? If we identify how we want customers to perceive us, and why they choose us – we can then build out ways to measure these perceptions.
- Teams make customer-driven a factor in hiring, rewards, and promotions. What if in performance discussions and promotion announcements we highlighted more about whether someone solved a customer problem or learned from customers (even if it wasn’t the right solution) vs. landing a plan or shipping their features? In addition, how might we think about our team members’ commitments in our review process? Are there specific customer-focused actions that we can highlight? When hiring, we should choose those candidates that demonstrate curiosity and are open to having their assumptions about customers challenged (#growthmindset).
- Teams have supportive managers that make customer focus a priority. Middle management holds the keys to this culture change. In many orgs, there is no incentive to take the time to talk to customers, which leads to the de-prioritization of customer-focused work. In a few places across our org, there are teams who don’t feel ‘allowed’ to pivot when customer data tells them they should. Managers will need to provide time in the schedule, support, and incentive for these behaviors to create a learn-it-all, customer-driven culture – knowing that this might mean we may not do other things or might ship more slowly.
I hope that sharing my organization’s experience in becoming customer-driven has provided some food for thought and ideas that you can implement to enhance your own efforts. Stay tuned for an upcoming blog article about how these insights resulted in a Customer-Driven Maturity Model used across our organization. The model has been a key tool in talking about system-level change and the many dimensions of culture the org can focus on to build more customer-centric products.
Where do you think your company or leaders land with regards to being customer-focused? Where are you rocking it, and where could you do better? Tweet us your thoughts at @MicrosoftRI or follow us on Facebook (opens in new tab) and join the conversation.
Nancy Perry is the principal research manager for Outlook product and services at Microsoft. Prior to this role, she managed a horizontally focused user research team that empowered product teams with customer-driven practices, tools, and data/insights – to ultimately increase the scale and visibility of research and customer engagement across our organization. She and her team have led research around culture change to understand customer-driven behaviors and drivers of product/customer impact. Nancy has been at Microsoft for 20 years, driving UX strategy and conducting research for a range of products and experiences such as Surface Hub, Windows Hello, Microsoft Advertising, Xbox Kinect, HoloLens, and BizTalk/SQL Servers.