By Hilary Dwyer, Ph.D. (opens in new tab)
Image credit: iStock
My colleague Nancy Perry recently posted about how we’re driving a customer-driven mindset in our organization (opens in new tab). Why are we focusing on this? We believe that a key piece of successful product making is interacting with and putting customers at the forefront of what we build. This process goes by many names: customer obsession, human-centered thinking, or customer-centricity. In Experiences + Devices (E+D) at Microsoft, we use the term customer-driven.
Customer-Driven is not just about talking to customers. It also encompasses how we work, what we value, and the tools we have in place to build products. We’ve learned that when the organization ensures certain conditions are in place, employees are more apt to put customers at the forefront of decisions and actions. These conditions span areas like scaled access to customers, attitudes towards learning, leader support, and how employees are rewarded.
But how do you decide which conditions are important, and for whom in the organization? How do you show progress over time, and evaluate what’s working? How do you make complex ideas accessible and easier to engage with? In my first year at Microsoft, I was struggling with these very ideas. I was doing a lot of research on employees and engineering culture, but the findings were messy, complicated, and spanned many topics.
Communicating complex ideas with scoring rubrics
I went back to my Education work and reflected on how I evaluated complex and complicated ideas in other settings. As a teacher, I preferred scoring rubrics (opens in new tab) because they described what success looked like across a variety of attributes, and I could evaluate students’ strengths as well as areas to improve. Even better, students could judge their own work with a rubric, and the grading process was demystified. I began to wonder if I could take my culture research at Microsoft and repackage it into a scoring rubric.
I started looking for examples of scoring rubrics outside of Education and discovered maturity models. One of my favorite examples was the Design Maturity Model (opens in new tab) by Invision. Using robust survey data, the authors identified five levels of design maturity and explained patterns by type of company, industry, or size of the design organization. I also looked at maturity models for Diversity and Inclusion (opens in new tab) and UX (opens in new tab). I realized that a Customer-Driven Maturity Model could be a helpful way to interpret and assess system-level change.
Creating and refining our maturity model
The biggest challenge was figuring out what Customer-Driven topics should be included and how to describe these topics at different levels of maturity. Partnering closely with Nancy Perry, we drafted our first version of the maturity model in the summer 2020. And it was rough! We had a lot of dimensions, and some were difficult to describe across maturity levels.
Next, we did research on our draft. We interviewed stakeholders and talked about the model with them. Through these conversations, some dimensions were woven into others, and some were removed. Then we looked at my other research projects and refined the model again and again with data from surveys, observations, and interviews.
After 6 months, our final maturity model included 10 dimensions of customer-driven culture change over three levels of maturity (early, progressing, and advanced). We simplified further by grouping the dimensions into buckets like sources of customer voice, ways of working, and leadership and values. Below is an example of what the final model looked like.
Almost immediately, the Customer-Driven Maturity Model resonated with others!
Soon after we internally published the maturity model and started talking about it, stakeholders across our organization were intrigued. My team used the maturity model to create assessments and metrics, shape our storytelling, and develop new skill-building resources. As we shared, we started seeing leaders, champions, and activators ask more nuanced questions about culture change and show curiosity about new customer-driven topics. Leaders began to recognize that customer-driven culture change went far beyond talking to customers. They started to see themselves as important to the process and they began modeling the behaviors we wanted everyone to engage with.
Teams came to us and asked which dimensions to focus on and how to develop new objectives around those dimensions. Since there are many ways to succeed in the maturity model, teams could focus their efforts on areas most applicable to their product area. For instance, in some parts of the organization, everyone may be talking with customers, but the activities are not celebrated in big meetings or informing rewards conversations. The maturity model sparked conversations rather than introduce a new success metric.
Lastly, the maturity model provided a better way to communicate blockers and accelerators to growing a customer-driven culture and evolved into a research roadmap for my work. As I ran more studies, I could locate blockers within dimensions of the model or across the maturity scale. On the flip side, I could educate about what accelerates customer-driven culture change, such when UX researchers are involved in day-to-day decisions. Researching blockers and accelerators to customer-driven maturity has become a major part of my work at Microsoft.
What do you think? How could becoming more customer driven help your organization? If you are on a similar path, how will this information help you? Tweet us your thoughts at @MicrosoftRI or follow us on Facebook (opens in new tab) and join the conversation.
Hilary Dwyer is a data-loving UX researcher curious about the ways that technology can simplify how we work, learn, connect, and collaborate. After earning her PhD in Education from University of California Santa Barbara in 2014, Hilary has used research to drive impact across a variety of contexts and tools. She loves findings ways to leverage her teaching and learning expertise to create inclusive teams, launch new products, and shift organizational culture. Hilary joined Microsoft as a senior design researcher for a new initiative that encourages employees to be customer-centered in their thinking and product development. Her work investigates how individuals and teams shift their attitudes and behaviors over time to create a culture grounded in the needs of customers using qualitative and quantitative research methods.