Customer Zero
The Difference Between Cat Herders and Dog Fooders
As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing.
Ever have one of those days when you’re doing the thing but you’ve lost track of why the thing is THE THING? We all have those moments, and in such instances I find it useful to reset my state of mind to something I’ll call “customer zero”.
My team in my Kindle days worked on a variety of cross-org problems, one of which was running beta programs for new product launches. We had a couple of teammates that ran that effort like a well-oiled machine - device after device, release after release, patch after patch went through a rigorous cycle to ensure it was customer ready. And (this didn't dawn on anyone at the time) it really was just a couple of folks managing beta testing simultaneously for multiple products. Just goes to show that when someone truly own…
