Changing Your Teams Decision-Making State

@October 9, 2021

If you asked every member of your team to write down their understanding of who you build for, what they're struggling with, and how they define success, what you hear will tell you a lot about how your team is making decisions.

Customer Folklore:

If someone from marketing responds to this question with a persona descriptor, someone from product describes a use case, and someone from customer success describes a pain point, and there is no real shared understanding that you could verify with your customers even if you wanted to - your team's decision-making state is based on folklore. There is no consensus at the stating line. Not within teams. Not across teams. Not between your team and your customers.

When your customer stories have similar main characters but different plot points, you're making decisions based on customer folklore.

Customer Consensus:*

When your team responds to this question with a single, shared, empirical understanding of your customers, when they can tell you confidently that they know it to be true because they have verified it by listening to and observing actual customers, then your team is making decisions based on a customer consensus.

When you're making decisions based on folklore, everything is a guess or a mess. UX meetings drag on and on because everyone is defending their version of the customer. What gets built in-app doesn't match what gets built for email. Big opportunities get missed. Huge.

When your team makes decisions based on customer consensus, marketing and product aren't bumping into each other - they're supporting each other. You're getting acquisition, activation, and retention outcomes. And competing strategic priorities sort themselves out.

* I'm still noodling if consensus is the right word for this