Jeff Bezos has openly shared his ‘secret’ to Amazon success is “obsessive compulsive focus on the customer”.
Is Jeff Bezos revealing the truth behind his success? Yes, I believe he is. Steve Jobs contributed to Apple’s success by doing the same thing — obsessively focus on customer experience. Apple insiders described Steve Job as the true CEO: “Customer Experience Obsessor”.
Now that the secret to success is out, then why isn’t every business as successful as Amazon or Apple?
Last week I gave a guest seminar titled “Design Sprints & the Future of Work” to a class of Master students at a university in Hong Kong. In my talk, I shared the importance of having the attitude of “Starting with Empathy”, in which I shared Jeff Bezo’s “secret” and also my own work stories. Here I’d like to unpack my thoughts further, especially for leaders and executives in minds, because your team relies on you to make the change and lead them towards success.
#1 Starting with Empathy
Many describe empathy as the ability to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Excellent, but true empathy doesn’t stop there. Because it is the positive change in people’s lives that true empathy aspires to accomplish.
To do that, we need to go beyond awareness. It requires effective problem solving: the ability to reframe and define the better question to solve, to come up with the best way to solve it, and to do it in the most sustainable and profitable way. All these translate into actions — hard work and collaboration, without losing focus on making better changes in people’s lives.
We need to change from:
Talking about Empathy → Practicing Empathy
#2 Choose to be a leader, not a follower
It’s very difficult to find a company that says they are not customer focused. Ironically, while many businesses say they focus on their customers, they are more obsessed with their competitors.
It is easy to tell if your product team has fallen into this common trap. When a team constructs a product roadmap mostly based on competitor’s research, focusing on the list of features (to catch up) and dismissing the need to articulate the evidence that justifies the why behind the feature, then you know your product is on a dangerous track.
Jeff Bezo pointed out the root of the problem: “If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering,”.
We need to change from:
Playing the catch up game → Pioneering for your customers
#3 Use UX the right way to unleash business and team’s potential.
While good UX is good business, poor UX causes lasting damage. The perception of “you don’t care, or you’re not smart enough to care” becomes part of the brand experience.
Unfortunately, many companies get UX wrong — and they don’t even know it. Therefore, they end up wasting resources building the wrong thing, and use up more time and money to make corrections or incremental improvement.
In Jeff Bezos’ words, “It is not their job to invent for themselves”.
Customer obsession is hard work. Instead of passively gathering ‘voice of customers’ and giving them what they asked for, it requires a deep understanding of customers’ value, user journey, desired outcomes, barrier to success, and the ability to ideate and validate the best solution on their behalf.
We need to change from:
Focus on UI but not UX → Get UX right to create an aspiring brand
When all these look like hard work, this is exactly why your customers would appreciate your brand over the others. It is your willingness to be obsessive about making a difference in their lives, which makes your solution and your brand aspiring to your customers.
Is there anything stopping you from doing what is right? What would be one small step you could take to put Jeff Bezos’ secret to success into practice?
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