Why most enterprises misunderstand what customer focus actually requires.
“Customer-centricity” is one of the most overused phrases in corporate life.
It appears in strategies, values statements, and town halls. It features in leadership principles and onboarding decks. It is invoked at the start of transformation programs and engraved on the walls of innovation labs.
But when I ask where customer insight actually influences resource allocation โ where it has the authority to change a decision that has already been made โ the answers become vague.
Not evasive. Vague. There is a difference. The people I ask are not hiding anything. They genuinely have not been asked the question in quite that way before.
And that vagueness is the problem.
Customer-centricity is not about empathy exercises. It is about decision authority. Until insight has the structural power to disrupt a committed plan, everything else is theatre โ well-intentioned, sometimes genuinely moving theatre, but theatre nonetheless. This distinction sits at the heart of what we call the Empathy Mindset โ the first and most foundational of the Five Mindsets we work with at McKay Consulting. Empathy, practiced properly, is not a workshop format. It is a sustained organizational commitment to letting user reality reach the people who make decisions about it.
When Insight Does Not Shape Direction
I have worked with teams who conducted rigorous, expensive, carefully documented research. Field interviews. Shadowing sessions. Usability testing across multiple user groups. Behavioral analytics that tracked friction with precision. The kind of discovery work that would appear in any design thinking textbook as exemplary practice.
The insight was clear. The current roadmap was materially misaligned with real user friction. The evidence was not ambiguous. It was not a matter of interpretation.
And yet the roadmap remained unchanged.
The reasons, when surfaced honestly, were entirely rational from inside the system:
Funding had already been committed to specific workstreams. Stakeholders had made public promises in quarterly reviews. Re-sequencing the roadmap would require conversations that felt politically dangerous. The cost of honoring the evidence was higher, in the short term, than the cost of ignoring it.
In that moment, customer-centricity revealed itself as optional โ a value the organization held until it became inconvenient, and then quietly set aside.
This is not a story about bad leadership. It is a story about a system whose incentive architecture was never actually aligned with the principle it claimed to hold. The people involved were not cynical. They were trapped in a structure that rewarded commitment over learning, and they responded to that structure rationally.
True customer focus requires that insight can disrupt planning. Not occasionally, not when the disruption is convenient, but structurally โ as a designed feature of how decisions get made. That is not a cultural aspiration. It is a governance shift.
Annual Budgets vs. Adaptive Learning
The deepest structural tension in most large enterprises is between the annual financial cycle and the reality of how digital products actually behave.
Annual budgets were designed for industrial predictability. You know roughly what inputs cost, you can forecast outputs with reasonable confidence, and the primary challenge is operational execution rather than directional discovery. That model works well for stable, mature product lines where the unknowns are manageable.
Digital products do not behave industrially. They evolve through interaction. User behavior reveals things that no amount of upfront analysis could have predicted. The product you ship in January is not the product your users need by June โ and if your funding cycle cannot accommodate that reality, you will keep building the wrong thing with increasing efficiency.
If funding is locked upfront, learning becomes a cost rather than an asset. Every piece of research that suggests a directional change is, in that context, a threat to a committed plan rather than an input to a better one. Teams learn this quickly. They begin filtering what they surface, softening what they report, framing insights in ways that are compatible with existing commitments. Not because they are dishonest โ because they are realistic about what the system can absorb.
The way through is not to abandon financial discipline. It is to stage it differently.
I have seen organizations begin to decouple base funding from adaptive funding. A stable operational core remains protected โ teams have security, infrastructure is maintained, ongoing commitments are honored. But incremental investment is released in stages, tied to validated learning rather than upfront commitments. Hypotheses are named explicitly before funding is approved. Evidence is reviewed before the next tranche is released. This is the Filtration Mindset operating at the portfolio level โ the discipline of deciding what to continue, what to stop, and what to sequence next, based on evidence rather than commitment. Most organizations apply filtration only at the start of a cycle. Mature ones apply it continuously.
This does not reduce discipline. It increases it โ in a direction that actually serves the organization. It forces teams to articulate what they believe and why. It forces leadership to engage with evidence rather than receive it passively. And it makes customer truth economically consequential โ which is the only way it becomes organizationally real.
The ask of senior leaders in this model is the same ask the operating model article described in a different context: get comfortable treating a stopped initiative as a success. An investment that was halted because the evidence didn’t support it is not a failure. It is the system working. It is capital that did not flow toward the wrong thing, freed to flow toward a better one.
That reframing is harder than it sounds. But it is the difference between an organization that performs customer-centricity and one that practices it.
The Percent People Problem
Before we talk about what works, it is worth naming precisely why the research-that-changes-nothing failure happens so reliably โ because the cause is not what most people assume.
It is not that the research was poor. It is not that leadership was resistant. It is not even, in most cases, that the governance structure actively blocked the findings.
The cause is simpler and more structural than any of those explanations.
The research was commissioned centrally, delivered as a document or a deck, and presented to product leaders as a homework assignment. It arrived in a format designed for the logical mind โ percentages, segments, charts, ranked friction points, statistically significant findings. Seventy-three percent of users reported difficulty completing the task. Forty-one percent abandoned the flow at step three. Satisfaction scores declined eight points year on year.
I began calling this the Percent People problem.
The numbers are accurate. The people behind them have disappeared.
What the agency delivered โ with professionalism and genuine rigor โ were abstractions of human experience dressed in the language of certainty. And abstractions, however precise, hit the analytical mind. They produce nodding, note-taking, and polite acknowledgment. They do not produce the visceral discomfort that actually moves a prioritization decision.
The product leaders sitting in those readout sessions were not unmoved because they didn’t care. They were unmoved because the format of the research actively prevented emotional contact with the reality it described. A person struggling is a felt experience. Seventy-three percent is a number. The human nervous system responds to the person. It processes the number and files it.
This is the same PAK inversion we described in the previous article, operating in the register of empathy rather than capability. You cannot brief someone into caring about a user they have never encountered. You cannot slide-deck your way to the kind of prioritization shift that requires a leader to feel, not just understand, that something is wrong. The Empathy Mindset addresses this directly โ not by improving the quality of research decks, but by changing the format through which reality is delivered. Real questions asked of real people in real contexts. Not percentages. Presence.
Insight that only reaches the logical mind does not change behavior. It changes opinions. And opinions, in organizations with strong governance and committed roadmaps, are significantly cheaper than decisions.
The Percent People problem is not solved by better research. It is solved by changing how reality reaches leadership โ which is exactly what the next layer addresses.
Captain’s Immersion: What Cannot Be Delegated
There is another layer to customer-centricity that no governance reform can replace, and it cannot be delegated down the hierarchy.
Before I tell you what actually works, it is worth pausing on a famous attempt that almost does.
Jeff Bezos is well known for leaving an empty chair at every Amazon meeting โ reserved for the customer, because, as he put it, the customer can never come to our meetings. It is a powerful symbolic gesture, and as someone who served as Studio Director for Amazon Digital Products in the Bay Area, I saw firsthand the organizational culture that practice helped create. The empty chair sent a real signal: customer impact is present in this room, even when no customer is.
But a symbol is not a substitute. The empty chair is an abstraction of a customer. Each person in a meeting is free to populate that abstraction with their own assumptions and biases. It keeps the idea of the customer alive in a room. It does not deliver the friction, the frustration, or the lived reality that actually shifts a strategic direction. The chair is empty for a reason โ and the reason is the problem.
What moves leaders is not the reminder that customers exist. It is direct, unmediated contact with how customers actually experience what those leaders have decided. That requires something the empty chair cannot provide.
When senior leaders experience user reality directly โ through immersion rather than dashboards โ something shifts that reporting cannot replicate. Let me tell you about the moment I understood this most clearly.
In the mid-2010s, following India’s landmark Aadhaar digital identity act, PayPal was navigating one of the most consequential strategic questions in its APAC business: how should a globally known internet payment brand position itself in a rapidly digitalizing India? The regulatory shift had opened a genuine window. The question was whether PayPal would step through it as a payment tool โ useful, familiar, bounded โ or as something more ambitious: a digital financial product for all of India, built around the lived realities of a population being transformed by urbanization, mobile connectivity, and a generational divide in digital ability that was reshaping families from the inside.
We had been deep in field work. Real interviews. Real homes. Real friction. The Five Mindset Sprint had produced a rich generative body of work โ concepts grounded in the actual texture of Indian life in that moment: families torn apart by radical urbanization forces, remittance patterns shaped by geographical separation, grandparents unable to navigate digital interfaces their grandchildren used instinctively, entire financial behaviors built on trust networks that formal banking had never reached. The market was not underserved in the way that word is usually meant. It was differently served โ by systems of relationship and obligation that a product designed for Western digital consumers had never been built to understand.
I invited PayPal’s SVP for Branding and Marketing in APAC to come to the sprint site for two days.
Before she arrived, I gave her a single instruction: do not tell anyone you are a senior leader. You are a customer researcher. That is your role in this room.
She sat in a separate interview space. She conducted interviews herself โ not observed interviews, not moderated sessions with a researcher in front and an executive behind glass. She asked the questions. She heard the answers directly. She watched people describe their relationship with money, with family, with digital tools, with trust โ without the layer of preparation and polish that descends on every interaction the moment a room understands it contains someone important.
She also reviewed two sets of strategic materials side by side: the existing marketing strategy, built on brand recognition and the familiar PayPal value proposition, and the renewed strategic direction we had developed from the Five Mindset work โ grounded in the actual emotional and social architecture of Indian financial life as we had found it in the field.
At the end of the second day, she found me.
“Michael,” she said, “my idea of what we need to do in India has shifted dramatically from what I thought before and what I need to do today. Thank you.”
Not: the research was interesting. Not: this gives us something to consider. A dramatic shift. A before and an after. Named directly, without qualification.
This is what I call Captain’s Immersion: the deliberate practice of placing senior leaders inside unmediated customer reality โ not as observers, not as executives receiving a briefing, but as participants whose rank has been temporarily set aside so that the signal can reach them without the organizational noise that normally surrounds it. The instruction to say she was a customer researcher was not a theatrical device. It was a structural one. It removed the performance layer from both sides of the conversation โ the customer who would otherwise have answered differently, and the leader who would otherwise have listened differently.
It works because it bypasses the summarization layer โ and the Percent People abstraction layer โ that sits between leadership and customer truth in most large organizations. Every handoff in the reporting chain introduces compression, context loss, and the unconscious tendency to smooth the edges of findings that might be difficult to receive. By the time insight reaches the executive level, it has often been processed into something palatable. The friction has been managed. The discomfort has been reframed as an opportunity.
Immersion removes that processing. The edges stay sharp. The friction stays visible. The human being describing their financial life stays human, rather than becoming a segment.
The body registers what the deck cannot deliver. And it is the body โ not the analytical mind โ that actually shifts a strategic direction.
Customer-centricity requires proximity. Not as a scheduled event in the transformation calendar โ but as a recalibration practice built into the rhythm of leadership. The SVP who left that sprint site in India did not leave with better data. She left with a different understanding of what the problem actually was. That is the only kind of shift that produces a different decision.
From Symbol to Structure
The pattern across all of these shifts โ governance, funding, immersion โ is the same. It is the movement from customer-centricity as symbol to customer-centricity as structure.
Symbol is easy. It requires commitment without consequence. It generates alignment around a shared aspiration. It looks good in a strategy deck and sounds right in a town hall. It is not nothing โ shared language and aspiration do real work in organizations โ but it is not sufficient, and it tends to crowd out the harder conversation about what would actually need to change for the aspiration to become operational.
To understand what structural customer-centricity looks like at its most uncompromising, it helps to look at an organization that built it into the operational nervous system rather than the values wall.
I spent time in UX leadership at Amazon โ one of the most genuinely customer-centric companies in the world, though the version they practice is not the warm, empathy-workshop kind. It is closer to what I would call radical militant customer-centricity. Abrasive in its mechanisms. Highly effective in its outcomes.
The story that circulated on the management floor โ and I have no reason to doubt it, because the culture it describes was entirely consistent with what I observed โ was this.
Bezos, from the early years, subscribed personally to a feed of customer complaints as they came through the call centre and customer relations systems. Not summaries. Not categorized reports. The original customer statements โ verbatim, unfiltered, in the exact language the customer had used to describe their problem. He would then forward selected emails, with the original customer text intact, to a distribution list that reached all relevant leaders simultaneously. The emails contained no analysis, no context, no suggested solution.
Just a single character at the top: ?
And a direct forward to the manager responsible for that part of the product or service landscape.
The reported expectation was a realistic, tangible, actionable plan for immediate correction โ within less than an hour.
Not a meeting to discuss the issue. Not a task force to investigate. A plan. In an hour.
For the manager receiving that email, the moment was unambiguous: this was either a career-ending interaction or a career-defining one, and the difference was entirely determined by the quality and speed of the response. There was no middle ground, no procedural shelter, no committee to hide behind. The customer’s words were in the room. The founder was watching. The clock was running.
What this mechanism achieved โ structurally, not culturally โ was the permanent elimination of the distance between customer reality and executive attention. There was no summarization layer to soften the signal. There was no reporting cycle to delay its arrival. There was no organizational gravity pulling the finding upward through layers of management until it arrived defanged and rescheduled. The raw voice of the customer landed directly on the desk of the person whose decisions had produced the experience being described.
That is customer-centricity as an operating mechanism, not an aspiration.
I am not suggesting every organization should replicate the Amazon approach. The psychological pressure it creates is real, and the culture it produces is not right for every context. But the underlying structural logic is worth isolating and understanding: customer truth became economically and professionally consequential at the individual level, in real time, with no buffer between cause and consequence.
That is what structure means. Everything else โ the values statements, the empathy programs, the customer satisfaction dashboards โ is the symbol that organizations use to avoid building the structure.
Structure is harder than symbol in every organization โ not just Amazon. It requires that the principle be load-bearing: that it carry real decisions, real trade-offs, real consequences. The specific mechanisms will differ by culture, by context, by the maturity of the organization. What cannot differ is the underlying requirement: customer insight must have structural authority to disrupt a plan, release or withhold funding, and reach leadership without being processed into something comfortable first.
It means integrating discovery into portfolio reviews rather than running it in parallel. It means using user evidence as a gate in funding decisions rather than a decoration on top of them. It means putting experience metrics on executive dashboards alongside the financial ones โ not because experience metrics are softer, but because they are leading indicators that financial metrics, by definition, can only lag.
Most importantly, it means field immersion in leadership routines โ not because leaders need to become researchers, but because they need the unfiltered signal that proximity provides. And it means developing the organizational capacity to translate what is seen and felt in the field into narratives that travel โ stories that reach the people who weren’t in the room and earn their belief anyway. That is the work of the Storytelling Mindset: turning lived customer reality into a shared organizational direction, without filtering out the friction that makes the story true.
None of this is softer leadership.
It is braver leadership โ because it allows reality, rather than hierarchy, to guide direction. The question mark in Bezos’s email and the PayPal SVP sitting across from an Indian family in a field interview are expressions of the same underlying commitment: that the people making decisions should not be protected from the consequences of those decisions as experienced by the people they affect.
That is the power shift the phrase “customer-centricity” has always implied.
Most organizations just haven’t built the structure to make it real.
The Governance Question Nobody Asks
Let me leave you with the diagnostic question I now ask at the start of every engagement, because the answer tells me almost everything I need to know about the true state of customer-centricity in an organization.
It is not: Do you do user research?
It is not: Do you have a design team?
It is not even: Do you run discovery sprints?
It is this:
Can you show me a moment in the last six months where customer insight caused a committed plan to change?
If the answer is immediate and specific โ a roadmap re-sequenced, a funding decision reversed, a launch delayed based on what users revealed โ the organization has structural customer-centricity, whatever it calls itself.
If the answer is vague, general, or arrives after a long pause โ the organization has symbolic customer-centricity, however sincerely it holds the value.
That gap between symbol and structure is closable. It requires governance reform, not culture change programs. It requires staging funding differently, not running more workshops. It requires proximity to user reality, not more dashboards representing it.
And it requires, above all, the organizational courage to let what customers actually experience hold the same weight as what stakeholders have already promised.
That is the power shift the phrase has always implied.
Most organizations just haven’t made it yet.
This is the second article in a series on what product operating models actually require to work โ beyond the frameworks, the roles, and the redesigned org charts. The first article, What Most Product Operating Models Get Wrong, examines why structural change without behavioral change produces operating models that exist on paper but not in practice.
โ Go Deeper: The Five Mindsets
This article draws on the Five Mindset framework developed at McKay Consulting โ a structured approach to building product capability through practice rather than training. Each mindset corresponds to a day in the sprint arc and a distinct way of engaging with complex organizational problems. The customer-centricity challenges described in this article touch directly on three of the five.
The Empathy Mindset Real contact with user reality. The precondition for everything else. Not a workshop technique โ a leadership practice. The antidote to the Percent People problem.
The Ideation Mindset Generating before evaluating. How to surface what the system would normally filter out before it is spoken. Relevant when teams are stuck optimizing the existing roadmap rather than questioning its direction.
The Filtration Mindset The discipline of deciding what continues, what stops, and what comes next โ based on evidence rather than commitment. The mindset that makes staged funding work and gives customer insight its economic weight.
The Iteration Mindset Prototyping to think, not thinking to prototype. How to be wrong in specific, useful ways rather than expensively certain ways. The mindset that turns discovery from a phase into a continuous practice.
The Storytelling Mindset Clarity over authority. Turning lived customer reality into narratives that travel through the organization without their authors in the room. The mindset that converts insight into direction โ and direction into movement.
Explore the full Five Mindset framework and how it applies to your organization at mckayconsulting.dk/five-mindsets โ
Learn about the Five Mindset Sprint โ the week-long format that installs these mindsets through practice on real organizational problems.
https://www.mckayconsulting.dk/product-culture-assessment/ – this is our product culture assessment tool that helps leaders realize how they currently track and what changes could be beneficial to engage in. Free with option to engage in mckay consulting services.
If this article raised questions about your own operating model, get in touch โ
Further reading:
- Cagan, M. (2017). Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love. SVPG Press.
- Torres, T. (2021). Continuous Discovery Habits. Product Talk LLC.
- Rittel, H.W.J. & Webber, M.M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155โ169.
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