When I hear the term customer obsession, it makes me feel strange. Customer obsession sounds like something you should do but also don't want to get a restraining order, perhaps because of the connotation of the word obsession. That said, when I hear the phrase popularized by Amazon, it's about obsessing over the experience in the same way you sweat over the details. I'm on board with that.

In one of my first early career roles at ExactTarget, we had the slogan, "Subscribers Rule," and we immersed ourselves in their experience whenever possible. If there was one place that built my customer-centric approach to work, it was at One Medical. I learned a lot during my time at One Medical, but if I had to pick one thing, it was thinking about customer experience. From the founder having me read Setting the Table by Danny Meyer, or Amir (our CEO) mandating leaders to visit offices and speak to customers, and Kimber (CTO) enabling a culture where everyone in the Technology organization visited customers. The lessons I learned from there I've brought to other companies and helped early-stage founders build their own practice of it.

Regardless of what you decide to call it, the purpose of customer obsession is building your organization that centers around the customer experience with the hypothesis that a great customer experience and value delivered to them will grow the business. I'll share in this issue three areas that help me build this practice of building products around the customer.

Building authentic relationships

Starting with customers means getting to know them as human beings. Time with customers is precious. Customers are human beings and not just accounts who subscribe to an SKU you have. Get to know them as people and don't constantly market to them. Understand what the product enabled for them in their life and work backward from there.

A few years ago, I met Grace Walker, an independent designer using Webflow. A mutual friend introduced us when I realized all the Webflow customers I was interviewing were comprised of all dudes and looking to expand who I was doing research with, and that’s how I connected with Grace. Aside from getting tremendously helpful feedback, I checked in with Grace on occasion to see if there was anything else we could do to help. Her business continued to thrive! We finally got to meet in person at Webflow Conf in 2021 and have now become friends, including seeing each other again at Kinference 2023 in Brooklyn.

There are many customers like Grace who’ve become friends beyond the products and subscriptions. You have to start with authentically caring about the goals of the customers beyond your product and what they hope to achieve.

Have a CX routine

In June I wrote about the values of continuous research and this is my customer experience routine. Though I've fallen off the wagon several times, my goal for every week is to talk to one customer using the product I work on. I was doing this when I was at Webflow and now starting to build this out at Replit. If you're a Replit user, reach out to me to chat!

Not all processes have to be huge in the effort. In fact, the best ones are lean. I kept mine pretty simple to track customer conversations.

1. Start a file to track everyone you've talked to (and want to talk to). I have a markdown file in Obsidian that helps me track records of customer conversations.

2. Ask the customer if you can record the session and upload the notes to a central repository. I've found Dovetail and Notably to be the best ones.

3. Share the insights in team shareouts or appropriate Slack channels.

If you do this throughout your tenure at a company and compel others to do so, you’ve developed quite a catalog of customer interviews over time. Customer conversations are a huge boost in morale, even if there are negative sentiments. What you'll often hear is even if they have feedback on areas to improve, they are critical because they love the product. One of the quotes I will always remember from my conversation with Grace was when she said, "I feel like Webflow put my design career on a rocket ship." Moments like that are what remind you why you do what you do and what a privilege it is to do it.

Construct feedback loops and data instrumentation

Avoid customer experience obsession being something performative. I've been at places where the notion of customer obsession was weaponized in blaming other people. Your number one goal in obsession over customer experience is to ensure things actually change for the better. The first thing you can do is instrument a way to make the insights actionable. Kyle, one of the designers at Webflow did this. He spun up a channel called UX Papercuts because there were so many pain points in the product that never got addressed. That Slack channel is now infamous and now has people rallying around it.

What you can also do is instrument feedback loops in the product itself. Survey fatigue is real. Avoid how often you ping the customers about feedback. It's better to give them better ways to reach out to you than you get too good at reaching out to them. Surprisingly, airport bathrooms are probably the ones that best figure it out with happy or sad faces. That's a great start, but design your feedback loops in a way you can follow up in greater detail. These signals are the way data and research teams should be working together. Give a frictionless way to alert the smallest feedback and allow more detailed conversations to happen from that.

Better products and businesses are built on customer experience

When I look back at my time at One Medical, there was a ton to be proud of. What gives me the most joy is thinking about all the patients and clinicians who gave us time to share feedback on how to make their experience better. It was amazing to be at a place, especially in healthcare, where you could have so much direct access to customers.

There are two things people lose sight of as companies grow: using the product you build day-to-day, and spending time with customers. Don’t let this happen to you. Customer obsession is not something you simply put in your core behaviors to make it sound nice. It's something you live and breathe, and the way you operate should reflect it.

Week 30 recap

The first paid post launched this week
I published the first paid post on Wednesday about my newsletter production cycle. Thank you to those who read it and will make sure they get written on the quarterly cadence, so expect the next one in October. Please know I will always publish the extra post vs. adding any paywall to the standard weekly Sunday posts.

Heading to Hawaii
I'm taking a vacation and will be in Hawaii for the next two Sundays. I'll have the next two issues of Proof of Concept scheduled so know I am taking time off but still dropping in your inbox. We’re going back to the big island again so if anyone has recommendations let me know. Otherwise, my plan is to swim at the beach and read.

Posting on Mastodon
Some folks have been asking if I’m on any Twitter alternatives. I am only active on Mastodon. I am not on Bluesky, T2 (though I love Terminator 2), Threads, or the other thousand social networks. My reason is simple…time. I know there’s a bit of a learning curve with Mastodon with the different servers, but where there are indie devs and infosec people, I am there. If you’re on Mastodon I’m @dh@indieweb.social.

Hype links

• Helpful secures $7.5M to launch family caregiver app → Congrats to Wes, a friend and my former manager at One Medical, on the new journey

• altmade.co → If you’re looking for design help, Richelle is taking on projects

• Why you didn’t get that design job → A great piece by Eric Snowden, Adobe’s VP of Design. It’s not you, it’s a lot of things. Hang in there.

• On being consistent by Mathu

• Degreeless.Design Digest → Newsletter by Tregg

• Thursday Nights in AI: Linus Lee, Notion → Excited for this event in San Francisco

• The future of coding weekly newsletter → Just signed up

• How to Scale Yourself Down — Not Up — as a Leader → A great read, especially for those in leadership. Time to rethink the scope of your new roles in the future

Job opportunities

• We're hiring at Replit

• Loom is hiring a Senior Product Design Manager

• Stripe is hiring a Product Designer, Internal Tools

• Adobe is hiring designers to work on FireFly and other Gen AI tools