Being customer centric means to internalize, to believe faithfully, that your money comes from real people who are genuinely helped by your work.

It’s very hard to be customer centric!

We have ourselves, family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances to worry about. There is little room to also bring in “customers” as real people.

Most advice revolves around various definitions of empathy for the customer. This is a trait neither commonly, nor equally distributed in humans. Plus, it’s also draining to overuse. Other advice is a gamble on experience. Experience could allow you to sympathize with the customer, because you too had their problem. Sympathy is also unevenly and rarely distributed. Plus, it creates blind spots through nostalgia.

That is why I propose the bread line: to be customer centric draw a straight line from customers to your bread. You have your bread because customers bought it for you. Things that fall in that line are important, impactful and are very likely to improve the company’s bottom line.

All the money comes from real people. These people have reasons to believe that what they pay for is worth the spend. Because it solves a problem. Or because it improves a situation. Because it somehow makes things better or easier for them.

Once this belief is settled, customer centricity becomes a default. Whatever you do, whatever the task at hand happens to be, do it for the people who will be helped. Not for the sprint. Not for the boss. Not for the clout, not for the performance review. Work for humans, not for procedures.

Don’t “work for humans” in an emotional sense only. Literally do your best to understand how is it that what you’re doing now helps them next. It’s part of being customer centric to not do things that leave you lacking this understanding.

In a startup there is a small number of people. They see the people paying the money. Sometimes there is a sense of wonder and even disbelief that people really pay for what they do. There is an inherent customer centricity in small startups.

In a large corporation the money is obscured by other people, org charts, office politics, HR. It’s obscured even by other well intended stuff. Like “customer journey maps”, “personas”, “A/B testing”, marketing, branding, etc. Customer centricity must be cultivated in large corps.

Startup or billion-dollar corporation is irrelevant in the end.

The fact of the matter is, the bucks come from people paying their hard-earned money, because your work is valuable to them. Everything else is inherent complexity.

The customers pay our salaries. It’s not the owners of shares, not the board, not the CFO, not the CEO. All those between the customer and you are intermediaries. They commission infrastructure access to customers. That is why, being customer centric, is not related to raises, equity, time off and such. These are benefits offered by intermediaries to convince you to work with this set of customers. When you accept the benefits you accept the needs of the customers too, and that is good! It’s all you need to do great customer centric work: always think of how your work solves these needs.

Being customer centric doesn’t mean never disconnecting from work. It means while you work focus on the customer.

Being customer centric doesn’t mean being customer obsessed. We’re not stalking people. We’re helping them achieve their own objectives.

Being customer centric doesn’t mean ignoring colleagues, management, company strategy. It means filtering all of them through that line between your bread and the customer. See what is aligned and what is superfluous to you and your work. Offer your findings as feedback, then keep focusing on the customer.

Whatever it is the object of your work constantly mind how it is improving things for the humans paying for it. Nothing else is above this imperative. Do it not as a company directive, but instead as an internalized attitude towards your own work. 

Being customer centric is also a great way to end your day on a good note, every day. Instead of working for the owners, the board or the boss, consider the reality that you’re making a living from some humans who use what yourdo for their goals and aspirations. This is a great source of meaning in a capitalist trinket-abundant world.