Customer Obsessed Product

Co-written with Kasia Katner

Product people, and people who work in tech, spend a lot of time talking about what a good and bad product culture looks like. We’re always seeing articles on Medium (ha!) about what you should and shouldn’t be doing at your company to make sure that you’re building good products. But what actually are the aspects of a good product culture? And how do you know how to spot a good one?

At Cazoo, we strive to have a great and strong product culture. I think if you ask different people what their definition of good is, that will be subjective. But I think we can all agree on what bad product culture is, and if you’ve worked at a company with a bad one, you know what to look out for…

• Lack of product organisation and structure
• Decisions are made in silos and with no transparency
• Decisions are based on opinion and not evidence
• No focus on the customer (with little to no research or usability testing)

The last point is the most important — companies will always say that they are customer-focused, but when a customer gives feedback that goes against a business launch or proposition they will inevitably ignore it.

In order to be customer-obsessed you have to be challenging yourself to make transparent decisions that benefit customers instead of the business.

One of our values at Cazoo is to be customer-obsessed. It’s easy to say that you’re customer-obsessed and build products that no customer is going to use. That’s because in order to be customer-obsessed you have to be challenging yourself to make transparent decisions that benefit customers instead of the business. In practice, this comes in many forms…

• Making sure product managers and teams are given the context they need to make customer-obsessed changes (and challenges!)
• Aligning multiple departments to focus on our customers — we do this through our very talented CX department and steering group
• Being proactive, rather than reactive, to customer needs
• Giving teams the freedom and resources to conduct customer research and usability testing quickly and easily
• Challenging our product releases to be customer-focused and not just an MVP
• Get stakeholders involved in the customer experience and journey early
• Taking customer feedback seriously and acting on it, such as public reviews and colleague feedback

You may think this all sounds good in theory, but how does it look in practice? Here’s a real-life example for you.

Context: In a classic supply/demand scenario we wanted to increase our car inventory. At the same time, we knew that customers might want to sell us their car independently from purchasing their next one — something they couldn’t do at the time.

Alignment: We’ve identified key stakeholders across the business to understand opportunities and constraints. This involved stakeholder interviews in and outside the product domain.

Getting ahead: Because we had a high level of certainty that the desire to grow inventory was not going to go away, we invested our research and design resources into the initiative ahead it was planned for. The goal: to understand the competitor market, customer needs surrounding selling a car, current pain points, and delighters. This meant that by the time we were ready to build the solution, the process was accelerated by the knowledge we gathered, rather than slowed down by various uncertainties.

Get ahead of schedule with research so the process is accelerated by the knowledge you gather, rather than slowed down by various uncertainties.

The foundation of knowledge made it easy to separate must-haves from nice-to-haves and create a robust release roadmap that balanced the customer needs with business limitations.

With each step, we shared updates, invited stakeholders to research observations and playback, shared designs for feedback, ran numerous rounds of usability testing, etc. To put it shortly the decision-makers were taken on a journey. Was it all smooth cruising? Of course not, but the steps we took meant that we minimise delays and conflicts of opinion further down the line.

These are just some of the ways we drive customer obsession not just in product, but across the business. Of course, it’s not possible to be customer-obsessed 100% of the time. Sometimes we need to focus on projects that move the business forward commercially because that is the nature of the work and the times that we are in. But it’s important that we stop, assess this risk, and respond appropriately at a later time.

While there are many aspects to what makes a good and bad product culture we think that being customer-obsessed, and sticking to it, is one of the most important aspects between good and bad product cultures that we see today.