I listened to Lenny’s podcast with Jeff Weinstein from Stripe. His clear thoughts and simple practises on how to maintain a customer-centric focus in products inspired me to collect examples from him and add my own ideas.
This post contains practical examples and daily actions that teams can use to maintain customer focus. It follows on from my earlier reflections on design-led businesses and purpose-built products.
If design is to help a company maintain its competitive advantage and push the boundaries of problem solving, it must be a strategic partner, not just a supporting function. Every business function, including design, should think about the user first and foremost and develop solutions with the best user experience in mind.
While developing successful products may seem daunting, this post offers practical takeaways and reminders to integrate customer focus into the product development process.
Design your rituals like you design your products
Talk to customers
Talking directly to customers helps shape the product roadmap and speeds up development time to true value through fast feedback loops.
Although talking directly to customers is a cliche recommendation, it’s not always easy to follow. Let’s explore some practical tips.
Become text message friendly with a select group
Jeff suggests being “text message friendly” with 5-10 customers to better understand their needs and how to improve product.
He argues that a small, well-selected group can provide enough direct signals to focus your efforts effectively. While wider customer research is useful, research-led projects are not always the right tool for the job. Like any method or tool, it has to fit its context of use.
Direct interaction offers honest and immediate feedback, helping to better understand customer pain points and desires.
Sales is design research
Your sales team is a research function. They are talking to your ideal customers every day, getting more exposure to their lives and problems than any product manager or designer.
Ignoring these conversations because they are “just sales calls” is like ignoring technical engineering conversations because they are “just about code.”
Join the sales calls, talk to salespeople, or review their notes. Skim the transcripts or use AI to summarise the recordings. There are many clever ways to increase exposure to customers—or potential customers who have been pre-qualified by the sales team.
Below are more ideas on how to speak with customers.
Send a link to every new signup to have a one-on-one conversation to find out why they signed up and what resonated with them.
I did it inside 1oT Terminal’s onboarding flow.
When shipping something new for a specific customer group, reach out with the same texting mindset. Don’t ask for feedback from day 0, but observe how they use the product.
Using these strategies, you can set up a continuous feedback loop that helps you stay in tune with what your customers need and makes product development more effective.
Discover customers’ real problems
To build a great business, you have to develop genuine customer obsessiveness and understand the problems they are facing. This goes beyond just collecting feedback and implementing what they ask for directly.
You’re likely to end up with a more powerful and valuable product if you address the root problem from first principles.
Sitting in silence to reveal the roadmap
Jeff points out that founders and product people (guilty myself) tend to pitch a solution when they join a demo call.
But this doesn’t give us much chance to learn about the customer’s struggles and current problems.
Instead, listen carefully to customers to understand their needs and problems. You can build stronger relationships and trust by making them feel heard and valued.
Another advantage of listening quietly is that it reveals the real problems customers want you to solve. As Jeff said, “People don’t really get out of bed for their second problem. They get out of bed for their first problem.”
Listen to customers without quickly offering your own ideas, and identify the problems that would make them “jump through the computer” if you solved them.
Consider using these probing questions to help guide the conversations and uncover people’s most pressing pain points:
- Understanding their current focus:
- “If you weren’t talking to me right now, what would you be working on?”
- “Hey, do you mind just opening up your email? What’s in your inbox?”
- Identifying pain points:
- “What annoys you? What are you not looking forward to?”
- “What do you wish you could just have off your plate immediately?
- Exploring aspirations:
- “What’s a massive opportunity you wish was just one door away?”
These questions reveal what’s really important to the customer and what problems they are facing.
If your customers are smart and ambitious, they will give you their toughest problems to solve. By understanding their point of view, you can create solution that meet their needs, resulting in greater satisfaction and success.
Markets and customer needs change all the time. It’s important to keep listening to customers and value their feedback.
Gut check before jumping to solutions
Once you know what the customer’s problems are, you might want to start designing (solving the problem) right away. However, I’ve learned to pace myself.
To create something that customers love, it’s important to clearly understand what they need. Many people skip this step and rush to come up with solutions.
Don’t give in to this urge.
Before I offer solutions, I like to use gut check questions to better understand the problem and how the customer sees it.
These questions let me see the problem from every side:
- Is the problem important?
- What does the client think the problem is? What problem do they believe needs to be solved?
- What might the actual problem be?
- What is the root cause? How does the current system operate? Why did the current system cause the problem?
- Why can’t the current system fix its own problems?
- By answering these questions, I can tell if I really understand the customer’s main concerns and challenges, or if things are still unclear and I can’t explain them.
Design customer-focused interfaces
Once you’ve identified the problem, the next step is to solve it and come up with a design.
I use a few key principles when starting a new design project. These help me create interfaces that connect with users.
Keep things simple and obvious
One of my core beliefs is to “keep it simple and obvious.”
This means that every part of the user interface should be easy to understand. Users should instantly know what each element does and how to use it.
It usually comes down to three main things: context, consistency, and clarity.
Martin LeBlanc once tweeted, “A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.”
This perfectly captures my approach to UX and UI design.
Find the epicenter
This idea, borrowed from Basecamp or 37Signals, has stayed with me for many years.
The best way to design software is to focus on the core functionality of a feature.
When starting a new feature or product, the key is to find the “epicenter” - the most crucial piece of functionality that must exist before anything else.
Don’t begin with the navigation, branding, or peripheral elements. Instead, concentrate first on the core functionality that, if removed, would make the entire thing useless.
By focusing on core functionality first, you make sure the page’s primary purpose is clearly defined and delivered.
iA Writer is the best at it. It’s my go-to tool for writing.
If you’re wondering where to start with a new feature or product, start by finding the epicenter:
- What’s the one thing it needs first before it needs anything else?
- What is the core?
- What is the most basic functionality that must exist before anything else can exist?
Start with the most constrained approach
I start with the most constrained approach when building something new.
It’s best to start with a limited approach and then expand the solution based on user feedback.
Starting with the strictest solution helps to spot user roadblocks and get fast feedback. This helps improve and find the optimal solution through iteration.
If you start with the most flexible or comprehensive solution, you might not get useful feedback.
Users might also use the feature in ways you didn’t expect. It’s important to listen to the customer and let them guide the solution (see above).
By following these principles, I have created intuitive, focused, and customer-centric interfaces, leading to a better user experience and more value for businesses.
Cultivate customer empathy with role plays
We think that code is just code and that software works as it should. But adding new features or small changes to copywriting to meet regulations can change how users feel about the product.
Using the product as a customer can help you understand their experience better.
A common practice is a friction log. This is a detailed record of a user’s experience from start to finish. Someone acts like a customer and writes down each step, noting any difficulties, confusion, or frustrations they encounter.
Friction logs provide a detailed view of the user journey, highlighting pain points and areas that need work. They can be shared with the team to show how small problems add up and make experience worse for the customer.
My favourite friction log involves Bill Gates trying to install Movie Maker on his computer. You can find the email in Internal Tech Emails.
Friction logs give useful individual insights, but Stripe does more with their “Study Groups” approach.
Stripe employees join “Study Groups” to test the product as if they were new users.
In a study group, 4 to 8 employees from different departments come together to participate in a role-play as a fictional company with a specific goal for the session. They go through the whole journey of a product from the customer’s point of view.
This approach works because it follows two main rules: participants pretend they don’t work at the company, and they focus on using the product instead of fixing problems or offering critiques.
It’s great because it offers fresh perspectives from employees across various roles and breaks down silos between departments. Putting themselves in the customer’s shoes gives them a better understanding of how to improve product and come up with new ideas.
Friction logs and study groups help team members understand customers better by letting them use the product as users do. This leads to deeper insights and decisions that focus more on the customer.
Now that we’ve talked about speaking with customers, understanding the problem, and creating a solution, I want to finish by discussing how to motivate the team and the incentives structure within the team.
Move from vision to daily progress with metrics
I think having a clear vision helps you balance big dreams with everyday little things.
Jeff believes that leaders should combine the ideal state, or vision, with celebrating milestones to show progress in their communication.
So, on one side, use a marker to draw a bold and powerful vision. “Here’s an exciting vision of what it could be like if we could do it without constraints.”
There’s a great story about how Brian Chesky made a storyboard to show the perfect Airbnb experience from the viewpoints of both the visitor and host.
On the other hand, you should focus on solving burning use cases and problems for customers. When you address significant challenges for many people, you can show real progress. “Look at this, we’ve made this progress, we’ve made this progress. This is a big milestone.”
You can use those two approaches to tell an inspiring story, “Look, we’ve made progress,” and also present the business case, “Look at how much we could make and what it could become if we’re successful.”
If you don’t link short-term actions to long-term goals, you’ll get stuck in the rut of the day-to-day. It’s important to break out and develop a bigger vision.
“Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.” — Joel Arthur Barker Ratcliffe
I think every team works differently and develops their own vision. With that in mind, I’ll give some tips on choosing metrics.
Align the team around a single (customer) metric
Metrics can be a double-edged sword, but when they are well-defined and carefully chosen, they can be very helpful.
Choosing the right metrics can be tough because they might encourage the wrong behaviors or shift the focus from creating value for the customer to just improving the numbers. While business metrics are important, they can sometimes mislead us about what’s truly valuable to the customer.
Jeff suggests aiming for a single, clear metric for the team to focus on. This helps everyone work together, avoid conflicting priorities, and keep the customer in mind.
By rallying the team around one key metric, you can keep making steady progress and make sure that everyone’s work helps to enhance the customer experience.
The metric should be linked to customer value and success
A good way to check if the metrics you care about are linked to customer success, it to think what would happen if you took a screenshot of the metrics dashboard and shared it with customers or post it online.
If a customer sees it, you want them to think, “Wow, this company really cares about its promises. I can see myself in these numbers.”
Try to give that impression.
Count how many people achieved their goals after logging in
Jeff talks about something from Stripe that many companies can use: the percentage of customers who finish signing up without needing any help, also known as “zero support tickets.”
This metric is powerful because it directly measures how easy and clear the onboarding experience is.
A high percentage means that customers can start using the product by themselves. This improves their first experience and also cuts down on the company’s support costs.
Count the bad day events
If the way to check if customers are reaching their goals is too vague, try counting the events that “users would consider a bad day.”
Jeff said this might include several payment rejections, delayed payouts, or general 404 errors from Stripe’s perspective.
When you keep track of every time a user has a problem and show how often these problems happen, you highlight important issues that affect customer satisfaction and give a quantitative way to see and measure user experience problems.
This practice also has more benefits. It encourages solving problems before they happen instead of just reacting to them,and helps find and rank issues to get rid of them.
Generally speaking, by the time something becomes frustrating or annoying enough for a customer to message you, it’s usually a signal that ten more customers are dealing with the same issue but haven’t reached out yet.
Instead of waiting for the first message, keep an eye out for moments where the product fails customers and address those issues proactively.
(If you’ve made it this far, you’re a hero. Thank you!)
Building successful products might seem daunting, yet it really comes down to a simple formula:
- Find customers and understand their problems.
- Listen to their most pressing issues.
- Design and ship a product that solves those problems.
- Receive feedback and iterate on it.
This process may seem simple initially, but it can be tough to stay focused on the customer, especially when you’re navigating through company politics and competing interests.
Building great products is a team sport. Everyone contributes their expertise and focus. But outstanding experiences can only be created if everyone cares about the one thing that matters — the customer. We (the team) need to be empathetic and understand what customers need in order to continuously solve their problems.
If you know any good ways to help product teams focus more on customers, I’d like to hear them. I’m always looking to learn how others handle this important part of developing a product.