HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model Is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands

by David Cancel

I believe that in today’s world, helping is the new selling and customer experience is the new marketing.

Roadmaps solve for the company not the customer. What solves for the customer is non-stop testing and a continuous improvement. In place of a roadmap, the CEO and I would get together once a year and come up with themes for the next year. Not a roadmap, but very high-level themes -- like, “We would like to get into this business, or this area, or deal with this problem.” It wasn’t. “We need a product that can do x, y, and z,” it was asking the question, “Is there a product here?”

Communication needs to be central to your organization and your organization’s culture. If people aren’t communicating, they need to figure out how When faced with internal communication issues, most companies put Band-Aids into the system. They add more layers of process. They add project managers. And then they wonder why things are slowing down and why things are not getting done and why they’re in meeting hell everyday. It’s because they’re not dealing with the root cause of the problem, which is communication.

The end goal is learning. Evolution is a hugely important part of being customer-driven. Your team needs to be able to move fast enough to make changes based on product usage and customer feedback -- not because something is next on a roadmap.