Whose problems are you solving?

As an organisation grows it can be easy to lose sight of why your products worked in the first place. As you grow so does the snowball of things that are required just to keep everything running - and this can lead you to forget about your customers.

This becomes very evident in the way businesses price their products and services, and also the features they offer. For example charging a higher price to get “customer support” for consumer products. This is the business saying it is expensive to talk to you when our product fails, so we are going to charge you for it. Or as an alternative make customers, who are trying to reach you because your product is broken, speak to an automated machine for 30 minutes because talking to people is expensive.

From a product point of view, removing valuable features because it is difficult to maintain them in the way the business has now organised itself is an example of thing inwardly. Setting poor internal KPIs can also lead to teams pleasing the business and not the customer. For example lines of code written, of number of features deployed - who are these metrics designed to please?