Customer focus
How understanding the needs of customers changes everything
In a recent episode of the Invisible Algorithms podcast, I had the chance to share some of the practices I’ve implemented throughout my career in order to foster a culture that values innovation, teamwork and direct customer engagement and why I believe they are essential for teams and companies to create impactful products.
In my role, I've observed that when only product managers and UX designers interact with customers, teams have a limited perspective on the challenges and opportunities that exist. With this in mind, it’s important we involve the entire team in these interactions, including engineers. This increases the ideation power because everyone in the team will have a good understanding of the customer’s needs which leads to more ideas and to a stronger problem-solving capacity.
By taking this approach one step forward we have what I usually call collective ownership. When we have that, a team becomes robust to changes in it’s composition (people leaving, going on holidays, maternity/paternity leaves, etc.) being able to move forward irrespective of what elements of the team are out. Together with this, aligning teams around domain areas rather than functions, that is a team owns a specific part of the product and all the initiatives in that area from ideation/inception to delivery, irrespective of whether the solution involves the front-end, back-end, or any other aspect of the technology stack, brings an increased advantage. This approach ensures more ideas and a bigger sense of accountability and ownership. A robust team is also more equipped to experiment.
In order to achieve this kind of culture it’s important to start by ensuring the hiring process selects for people with personalities and skills that thrive in it. For instance, a person that wants to work in isolation will likely not be happy in an environment that encourages pair programming frequently to reduce knowledge silos and a specialist in let’s say Scala might be unhappy if asked to do frontend work.
With this in mind, the hiring process should naturally select for people that love team work and for generalists instead of specialists.
When it comes to innovation and reducing the risk, in my perspective, the best way to do so is to work in small iterations, validate the running software in production of those iterations with real users and adapt/pivot if/when necessary. This is key specially in a startup/scale-up world where the money is limited and we need to find as soon as possible if we are investing/building what matters to customers or are chasing a pipe dream.
In closing, whether you are at a startup or a large corporation, the principles of collective responsibility, cross-functional teamwork, and continuous improvement are key to staying competitive and driving innovation. I hope sharing my past experience and how it’s been working it in the day to day inspires you to consider how these principles can be applied in your own organisations to foster a highly collaborative and innovative culture.