Two modes

I’ve noticed there are basically two modes a company can operate in.

Customer-centric mode.

And engineering-centric mode.

Most great businesses start in the first one.

Someone sees a problem. A real person has something annoying, expensive, slow, painful or downright ridiculous happening in their life, and the company decides to fix it.

The early conversations are wonderfully simple.

What does the customer need?

What are they struggling with?

Can we make this dramatically better?

Would they pay for it?

Then something happens.

The company becomes successful.

It hires more people. It builds more technology. The technology gets more complicated. Teams form around different bits of it. Roadmaps appear. Acronyms reproduce.

And gradually, almost imperceptibly, the centre of gravity moves.

The conversation changes from:

“What does the customer need?”

to:

“What can we build?”

This is an incredibly easy trap to fall into, especially for technology companies, because building things is fun.

Engineering problems are interesting. New technology is exciting. Clever architecture is satisfying. And when you employ lots of smart engineers, they will quite reasonably find lots of fascinating engineering problems to solve.

Before long you can find yourself with 40 people enthusiastically improving something that no customer has ever woken up at 3am wishing existed.

Nobody decided to stop caring about customers.

The company just changed modes.

The question

Putting the customer at the centre gives you a wonderfully brutal test for any new project:

Will this delight someone enough that they’ll pay for it with their time or their money?

Will it help them make money?

Save money?

Save time?

Keep their job?

Get a better job?

Remove something they hate doing?

Make something difficult suddenly feel easy?

Those are useful questions because they force you to start with the person rather than the technology.

Engineering still matters enormously. It’s how you make the magic happen.

But it’s the means, not the destination.

Maybe the simplest test is this:

Engineering-centric companies ask: “What should we build next?”

Customer-centric companies ask: “What should we solve next?”