The Ground Level
An inevitable result of a successful startup is to scale to more and more customers. With this massive scale comes larger company sizes and a defined hierarchy. These organizations at their inception, however, begin at the “ground level”. The entrepreneurs care deeply about the company mission and do their best to serve customers optimally. They also have an intimate relationship with customers and are concerned at the core of solving a problem for the end user (for most successful startups). As employees are hired, a hierarchy begins to develop and roles become rigid and more defined. The organization elevates to higher altitudes above the ground level, and employees get caught up in making the company itself more successful through the increased reliance on “improving” metrics and analytics. But the customer ends up being forgotten, relegated to the “User Research” team for correspondence. Thus, new employees that join such a bloated organization have no clue what their users really want, need, or feel (besides through recruiting propaganda). The pursuit of solving a core pain point for the users becomes warped into pushing new features in the hopes that they will increase efficiency, cut costs, increase profits, hit KPIs or OKRs, or the like. As the corporate ladder grows, people look up at progress and not down at the ground level, where the top of the funnel really is. While this process does claim to increase shareholder value, one of the most important sources of this value, the customer, is seemingly forgotten.
This corporate process results in a loss of accountability for employees as company size grows larger. The person writing code, making a deck, or giving advice never has to confront the consequences of their work on the most downstream consumer. They are so removed by sitting at a desk in some mega-city that little attention is paid to the ground level work. Only the “user researchers” have this valuable customer relationship and their data is lost in translation as it goes through the hierarchy of the company.
In some sense the core objective of the employee should be to help the customer, as is the objective of the founders. Instead of cutting corners to release features quickly and hit timelines, there should be more focus on an analysis of the customer and deep thought into how those features may impact them. Too often the products we build negatively affect the less fortunate customers for the benefit of wealthy shareholders. But since compensation is tied heavily to equity markets, the real responsibility is lost. If the stock price is up, the company must be doing well, right? Does it matter if the downstream users are negatively affected when employees can go home with some more money in their pockets?
Ideally the concept of a user researcher should not exist - every employee needs to talk to customers. Employees should do their own research to come up with creative ways to solve customer problems or help customers do their jobs. If this is too drastic, maybe just have a dedicated user researcher embedded in each team of a large company. This person should argue on the behalf of the customer and hold engineers, PMs, etc accountable for the features they are rolling out. When the employee has to face another person who is affected by these features, there is an important change in mindset. You are not just working for yourself, your family, or your company. The realization that there are users out there just like the employee in their basics needs and wants will help foster more empathetic product construction.
Another related departure from the ground level exists in the way venture capital and public markets want companies to perform. If a new company is expected to grow and show the capital provider that certain metrics are being achieved, customers become numbers instead of people. Getting a new signup or contract is perceived as necessarily a good thing, and it is rarely questioned whether these customers 1) are of any quality 2) are satisfied in the way the product functions and solves their problem or 3) will be negatively affected in the long term by using the product/feature. A sort of hackability is introduced that allows for customers to be deceived in the short term to boost valuations. In the long term, this type of behavior will not create enduring value. The SodaCompany CEO (while sitting at a desk drinking some healthy beverage) wants to increase sales of Soda because thats what the shareholders want. What about the people drinking it?
However, this is not to say that the user is the end-all be-all for feature development. A balance has to be struck between company vision and user pain points/feedback, but large companies mostly suffer from gross assumptions about users without even having the user data or conversations to make a decision. If a company is intimately involved in the customer’s needs, it can better decide whether or not the data is valuable; being distant doesn’t afford the same clarity.
Founders know that the customer is the primary source of a successful business. Employees at large companies should as well. At the end of the day, the ground level is where the value of a business is truly created.