Building a user-centric culture
As much as I wish this wasn’t the case, you can build a highly successful B2B company that delivers a poor user experience, if your product is mission critical enough. People will complain but they will pay, particularly if you’re the best of a bad bunch. This approach doesn’t work for B2B companies whose products are more optional i.e. most productivity software and anything that can be replaced with a spreadsheet. In this category, the ok-ish product will eventually lose market share to one that is better and/or cheaper. A strong brand might build a temporary moat. Overtime this diminishes if the product is consistently out innovated and out marketed.
No company aspires to build products that people don’t like to use. So why does this happen? Sometimes it's the outcome of a lack of expertise. The company can’t figure out how to *build* good products. I don’t think this is the predominant reason in most cases. Hiring good engineers and designers is a problem that you can throw money at, provided you can figure out how to get the money in the first place. Instead, what I’m talking about here is a particular phenomenon, where resource rich (i.e. well funded companies with high calibre teams) build not-so-great products. This, I believe, is mostly caused by a lack of user-centricity in the DNA of the organisation.
User-centricity means putting your core user base at the heart of decision making. It doesn’t just impact how the product is built, but also the decisions surrounding it. This includes anything from defining refund policies, to designing support SLAs, to deciding which incentives you create to drive sales performance . Its absence tends to be a reflection of some sort of internal dysfunction.
A lack of user-centricity is a cultural issue. Luckily, it is one that can be fixed.
What prevents companies from being user-centric?
Undefined purpose: Call it mission, vision, strategy, north star, raison d'être etc. If a company doesn’t have a clear ‘why’, it becomes difficult to build a product that serves a specific ‘who’.
No principal user: Common in marketplaces, platform products and early stage companies who haven’t yet committed to defining their primary customer. Organisations fall into the trap of trying to solve for everyone and building a mediocre product that doesn’t solve anything particularly well.
Task orientation: Also known as a feature factory. Teams overly focus on building features for jobs to be done on a task level, rather than considering the holistic experience. Often the byproduct of fragmented product teams.
Operations focus: Occurs when there is a myopic focus on specific metrics/levers including revenue. Teams optimise for ‘moving the needle’ in isolation. This comes at a cost to the interconnected product experience. Can lead to products that are efficient but non-delightful.
Internal complexity: Large organisations are inherently more complex and self-imposed processes often make it harder to ship. Different teams have different goals which they are trying to solve for. Tradeoffs can be made, not with the user in mind, but rather to unlock bureaucracy bottlenecks within the business.
How to build a user-centric culture?
Avoiding the above helps to realign teams around the principle of user-centricity. However, these alone don’t create a user-centric company. User-centricity is a practice that needs to be deliberately cultivated. It should be understood deeply by everyone in the organisation (with a few internally only focussed role exceptions). Seniority or lack thereof is no excuse not to have a user focussed mindset. While it is often the more junior team members who have direct contact with high volumes of users (SDRs, support reps, CSMs etc), ensuring there is a user-centric philosophy across the org is the responsibility of the most senior leaders. User-centricity can easily be trickled down in team culture. It is near impossible to push it upwards if it doesn't already exist there.
Developing a user-centric culture means embedding user-centric practices into everyday decisions and rituals. This helps keep it top of mind for all team members. This can be done by:
Sharing a clear mission statement: Include details about what the company is trying to solve for and the key user base (will expand over time). Ensure this is part of the onboarding process. Communicate it regularly in company events and team meetings.
Including users as a consideration in planning: Decisions around long term strategy, headcount and quarterly goals should consider the impact on the user. Each team should consider how proposed roles, tradeoffs, projects and products will impact the user.
Exposing the team to users frequently: Make the mission come alive. Share user stories at All Hands. Invite users to speak at company events. Visit users in person. Share user research and sales recordings. This helps make the problems being solved more tangible in people’s minds.
Asking everyone to dog-food products: Include product training in onboarding. Encourage regular product feedback. Ensure all teams have an opportunity to interact with the product. Ensure GTM teams can demo the product, not just discuss talking points.
Incorporating users into company values: Celebrate user-centricity throughout the company (e.g on slack, culture awards) and during performance reviews. Encourage teams to develop guiding principles which incorporate the user experience in decisions.
This is a non-exhaustive list so if you have any suggestions feel free to add them in the comments below!
Another great article. It is fascinating to watch companies claimed to be customer/user focused, when only the design team has adjusted their way of working. The intent behind the movement towards people-centered products, was to convert the business as a whole.
UX got stuck in design and some departments have just changed their labels to "customer experience", without changing how they work. To be truly people-centered, every department has to ask themselves: If the user is at the center of our work, would we still do the practises we do? Will we still measure success the way we do? The answer is more than likely, no.
The disconnect between providing value and features is clearly also a challenge for many companies. Providing features are like providing letters (E T A F E R U S). Without understanding the structure (F E A T U R E S), the value you want to provide gets lost in the experience.
One thing I would add to your list, is that if a company truly wants to be people-centered, they would need to change their perspective from a "solution mindset" to an "understanding mindset". It is extremely hard to provide value, without understanding people (where they are, their understanding, their thinking, etc.) and the context (in relation to the market, your product and other people, etc.) they find themselves in.