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.
The Ground Level
The Ground Level
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.