Quick question: are we calling this customer-centric because customers asked for it, or because the slide needs a moral centre?
The slide currently says both. It is doing a lot of emotional labour for a rectangle.
We have three quotes, one interview, and a customer-shaped icon. The icon is the most confident evidence.
Before we ship the customer-centric version, can we check whether the customer has the problem we are solving?
Fair. I will replace the slogan with the observed behaviour, the uncertainty, and the decision we are actually making.
There is a particular kind of product meeting where everyone says “the customer” and nobody can name what the customer did last week.
The phrase has become so popular that it can now decorate almost any decision. We prioritised it because customers need it. We delayed it because customers are not ready. We launched it because customers asked.
What we know
Customers are not a single opinion with a convenient email address. They have jobs, constraints, habits, workarounds, and sometimes a request that is a perfectly reasonable solution to the wrong problem.
Listening is necessary. Listening is not the same as outsourcing judgment.
What we infer
“Customer-centric” becomes theatre when it is used after the decision, as a justification rather than an input. The customer appears in the narrative, but not in the evidence.
This is not always cynical. Teams are busy. A sentence about customers is faster than explaining the messy chain of assumptions behind a bet. The problem is that a convenient sentence becomes difficult to challenge.
How the customer disappears while everyone talks about them
The disappearing act usually begins with compression. A researcher speaks to twelve people and finds three distinct patterns. The readout becomes a slide. The slide becomes a bullet. The bullet becomes “customers want simplicity.” By the time the sentence reaches planning, nobody can see which customers, what they were trying to do, or what simplicity meant in their environment.
Compression is necessary; no organisation can replay every interview before every decision. But useful compression preserves the edges of the evidence. It should retain the segment, situation, observed behaviour and degree of confidence. “Four finance administrators created parallel spreadsheets because approvals were hard to audit” is less elegant than “customers want flexibility,” but it gives a team something it can investigate and eventually change.
Teresa Torres defines continuous discovery around frequent contact between customers and the team making product decisions. The important organisational effect is not merely more interviews. It shortens the distance between the people observing behaviour and the people deciding what to build. Fewer layers get to polish uncertainty into certainty.
The customer also disappears when a request is treated as a requirement. “Please add an export button” contains useful information, but it does not yet tell us whether the person needs portability, auditability, offline work, easier reporting or reassurance that their data is not trapped. Building the noun in the request may satisfy the sentence while missing the job.
Evidence has a texture
Not all customer evidence should carry the same weight. A support ticket proves that one person encountered something painful enough to report. It does not prove prevalence. A survey can estimate prevalence among respondents, but it may flatten context. Usage data shows behaviour at scale, but not necessarily intent. An interview gives context, but memory and politeness can distort what people say.
The answer is not to crown one method. It is to combine evidence whose weaknesses differ.
For example, a team might notice a drop in completion, watch sessions to locate the interruption, interview people who abandoned the flow, and test a smaller change. Each step changes the quality of the story. The team is no longer borrowing the customer as a rhetorical device; it is building a traceable case.
Intercom’s principle “Start with the problem” is helpful because it gives problem definition actual space in product work. The point is not to spend months admiring the problem. It is to resist committing most of the organisation’s effort while understanding least about what deserves to change.
Three forms of customer theatre
The first is the decorative quote. A vivid sentence opens the presentation, but the decision does not depend on it and contradictory evidence never appears.
The second is the executive ventriloquist. A leader’s preference is retold as customer demand because customer language sounds less political. This makes legitimate disagreement feel anti-customer.
The third is the research shield. Someone says “research validated it” without explaining the question, sample, alternatives or uncertainty. Research becomes a badge that ends discussion rather than material that improves it.
All three can happen without bad intent. They persist because organisations reward decisive stories. The antidote is not performative caution; it is making the chain from observation to interpretation to decision visible enough for another person to inspect.
A practical customer-evidence note
For a meaningful product decision, keep a one-page note with five headings:
- Who and when: the segment and situation represented.
- Observed behaviour: what people did, not only what they requested.
- Interpretation: what the team thinks the behaviour means.
- Counter-evidence: what does not fit the preferred story.
- Decision consequence: what changes because of this evidence.
That final heading matters. Research that cannot affect a decision may still be valuable learning, but it should not be presented as justification for a choice already made.
Questions to take back to your team
- When your team says “the customer,” can everyone name the segment and situation being discussed?
- Which recent product decision changed because of customer evidence rather than merely citing it?
- What counter-evidence was removed from the last research readout to make the story cleaner?
- Are you investigating what people do, or collecting quotes that approve an existing solution?
- If the preferred decision vanished tomorrow, would your customer evidence still point to the same problem?
Do not answer these as a maturity exercise. Pick one live roadmap item and trace the customer from observation to interpretation to decision. Where does the person become a slogan?
My take
Ask for the smallest concrete evidence:
- What did the customer do?
- In what context?
- How often did it happen?
- What did they do instead?
- What would we expect to change if we solved it?
If the answer is a quote, keep asking. Quotes are clues, not verdicts.
Customer-centricity should make decisions more honest, not more untouchable. The moment “the customer” ends the conversation, the customer has become a prop.