(2018-08-10) Rao So You Think You're Customer-Driven

Venkatesh Rao: So You Think You're Customer-Driven? I've made no secret of my strongly partisan belief that being product-driven is a far superior stance than being customer-driven, but I've never properly unpacked why I think that. Here's the main reason: To be product-driven you merely have to be a talented person in a specific narrow and easily testable way. But to be genuinely customer-driven, you have to be a better person in a hard-to-test way. Add to that my priors that talent is common, but genuine good character is rare, and you'll understand why I have the bias I do.

This does not mean you should not think about customers and users. That can't actually be helped.

But you must develop a skeptical self-awareness around what those thoughts mean because they will invariably be self-serving in ways you're probably blind to. In other words, you must know what you talk about when you talk about "customers" and "users".

my hierarchy of customer-relationship mental models. View this email in your browser

Hierarchy of customer-relationship models, from least to most honest

Level 1: designing/building products that provide a highly abstracted and instrumental view of the customer

The bad-faith lies in pretending that the massive asymmetric technological advantage over the user/customer doesn't affect how you construct the relationship; that a high-minded terms-of-service can neutralize the attendant moral hazards.

Level 2: "human-centric design" and "listening to customers". These are not innocent phrases.

prayer-like "user research" behaviors that don't uncover anything actionable, and constant self-flagellation and preaching at peers. The bad-faith here lies in pretending you're a true, saintly listener/father confessor/intercessionary figure mediating between a user and a technological god.

Level 3: Next up, we have the Anthropologist/Primitive Native pair.

You often find this archetype pair in Fortune 500 work practice/workplace anthropology departments. The bad faith in this posture lies in not acknowledging how your work is shaped by the institutional context

Level 4: The Parent-Child archetype pair is often found in ostensibly service-oriented organizations and people

as in the "libertarian paternalism" of Nudging philosophy

This is the authoritarian high-modernist (as in James Scott's Seeing Like a State) version of being customer-driven that I talk about a lot.

The bad-faith here lies in not acknowledging that things you dismiss as noise might be signal to others, and that you're constructing the "customer" or "user" to be legible to you

Level 5: Therapist/Patient or Expert/Layperson

you acknowledge key asymmetries and advantages, as well as relatively rigid elements of your own nature and motivations captured in the "expert" self-image

The bad faith here lies in the belief that in some narrow way, your claim to authority translates into a justified lack of accountability to others affected by your actions

Level 6: In-Group/Out-Group

real honesty begins

This is the world of Dark Pattern UX, telemarketing and late-night informercials.

The movie Boiler Room

The openly acknowledged and even celebrated part of the exploitation (often manifesting as insulting, profane, and derogatory ways of talking about customers) is actually the good-faith part. The bad faith often lies in more abstract macroeconomic and metaphysical justifications at the business model level

Level 7: Con-Artist/Mark

An excellent read exploring the psychology of this kind of customer relationship model is the classic 1952 essay by Erving Goffman, On Cooling the Mark Out.

The bad faith can usually be found in whatever self-imposed honor-among-thieves code of conduct governs how the relationship is constructed. "I only steal, I don't kill," or "I don't do anything violent",

Level 8: Honorable Warrior/Worthy Adversary

genuine attempt to "pick on someone my own size" and construct a fair relationship game

There is also room for growth in this relationship model, even if it is of a finite, limited sort within the particular gamification and stylized spirituality

One of my favorite explorations of the operative psychology is the movie Big Kahuna.

The bad-faith element here is the belief that a code of conduct can manufacture fairness out of unfairness and transmute power gradients into level playing fields. Many conservative social programs exhibit this kind of "honorable bad-faith".

Level 9: Self-Actualizer/Self-Actualizer:

You're both on open-ended evolutionary paths where many things about both parties' natures are either undetermined or subject to change, and you construct the relationship to allow for such change.

both are willing to constantly work deepen a relationship within the spirit of an evolving agreement rather than the letter of a static contract or TOS.

There is still room for bad-faith here though. You simply might not be as capable of growth as you pretend to be, and might repeatedly forgive yourself too easily rather than actually working to seek forgiveness from those whose trust you've abused.

Level 10: Adult/Adult: Nobody ever gets here

all limiting assumptions about yourself and the counterparty fall away, and you're simply growing together

The Customer is Dead, Long Live the Customer

I don't think you should strive to climb this ladder or view it as a sort of capability maturity model, at least not with explicit efforts. It is just too hard for ordinary mortals. Instead, you should probably do the simpler thing and be product-driven...focus on creating value by building better products that make use of deeper scientific and technological ideas rather than striving to be a better person through customer-centeredness.

sure, do your user testing... Just don't pretend that makes your work spiritually customer-centered business and based on real listening. You're ultimately not listening, you're constructing.

The entire concept of "customer" (or "user") rests on a profound sort of bad faith at the very heart of industrial consumerized society

when you think in terms of "customer" or "user", you are inevitably imposing a map of a market onto a territory of humanness, and blinding yourself in some way that introduces an element of bad faith into your actions.

This leads to all the pious lies of the consumer economy.

You can try to cleanse yourself of those lies. Or you could just build something you enjoy building and deal with the consequences as best you can.

Maximizing lifetime value (LTV) is ultimately not the same thing as valuing life itself. I'll believe your claim of being customer driven when you can demonstrate that you are aware of the difference between the two.

So, Do You Feel Saintly, Punk? Do You?

The behaviors we label "being customer driven" are deeply complicit in everything problematic about the industrial economy, not a cure for its ills.

If you think you can fix the problems of the industrial world by being more "customer driven" or "human-centric" in your work, you're lying to yourself in a very deep way.

There is some sort of Heisenberg principle here: you can either construct a customer or listen to them. Not both. To be product-driven is to admit that there is a limit to your ability to listen, due to your investment in construction.

Peter Drucker understood this when he proclaimed that the purpose of a business is to create a customer

Look around online. Vast numbers of people claim to be listening. Very few feel listened to (dis-engagement). Nobody feels sufficiently consulted on all the things that end up affecting their lives, and so they turn to everything from ranting on Yelp to trying to make magic with memes. All in a desperate attempt to be heard in a society and economy that pretends to be based on listening but is in fact based on constructing; that pretends to acknowledge existence, but is in fact about imposing an essence.