Customer Focus and Hidden Costs

The principles behind customer focus and customer obsession are becoming widely shared. They’re intended to encourage us to center the…

The principles behind customer focus and customer obsession are becoming widely shared. They’re intended to encourage us to center the customer in our thinking about products rather than centering ourselves. We engage in empathic ways of thinking about customer experiences that cause us to set aside our workaday understanding of our own businesses and focus on the customer’s problems.

One of my favorite touchstones for customer focus is the idea that you should focus on the experience that you want the customer to have and “work backwards” from there. This is a simple idea that sounds like a slogan but is actually very powerful when made into process. If we start with the agreement that enabling a specific customer experience is our essential goal, obstacles previously thought to be insurmountable become the locus of our attention for investment and innovation.

That part about agreeing on the primacy of the customer experience is absolutely essential. The entire team must share the understanding that the customer will determine its success or failure. Each function must view its own priorities as subordinate to the customer’s. Otherwise the experience will suffer a death of compromises.

I was talking to an executive about the idea that efficient marketplaces for talent could potentially address a lot of the problems in the world of creative freelancers. She shared her concern that there were thousands of little problems to solve in matching employers with providers, doing that quickly and fairly, figuring out what to charge, and ensuring the quality of their work.

These are exactly the reasons that I was once convinced that Uber was never going to work. There were too many operational problems to solve, and they all got worse at scale. But for its deficiencies, Uber’s relentless focus on the experience of hailing a ride has made it possible to accomplish something that once seemed impossibly complicated, with just a single tap.

Reaching back a little further, the iPod is another textbook example. It’s easy to forget what a pain in the ass digital music was. Working backwards from a great listening experience, one encounters a myriad of seemingly intractable problems: Legal, technical, licensing. Through relentless investment and innovation, the magnitude of those problems was relentless winnowed down in relation to the benefit that customers get. And today it’s nearly effortless.

But with Uber and digital music, new problems were created along the way. These will have to be solved if the solutions are to last. Products that seem the most like magic often also come with the highest hidden costs. And those costs seem to take longer to reveal themselves than the genius of their original invention.

Managing those costs is essential for companies who want their new products to stand the test of time.