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Don’t Be Customer-Centric
If you want to leave a legacy and make an impact you have to aim higher
I’ve been part of four B2B marketing teams and have also been a solopreneur in different seasons of my life. And the dogma has always been to listen to our customers and give them what they want.
In fact, isn’t that the job description of a Product Manager? To survey customers about and tell engineers and product developers which features customers want?
And although pleasing the whims and desires of your customers is a good way to make money and stay in business, being customer centric stifles innovation and it’s the opposite of creating thought leadership.
So, if all you want to do is make some money (which is totally fine, no problem with that), by all means, be customer centric. But if you aim to change your industry or become a thought leader, create a vision of the future that your customers have not imagined yet.
They say that Jeff Bezos created a culture that is obsessed with the clients, and there lies the secret to his success. But the truth is that Amazon’s success is due to a lot of factors, including timing and luck, not just a customer-centric culture.
There is also the cliche cautionary tale of the start up that didn’t do focus groups and…
