Transformed

CHAPTER 21Partnering with Customers

In many companies that follow the prior models, especially companies that provide products to businesses, the relationship with customers is too often not where anyone wants it to be.

From the customers' perspective, the company may be perceived as unreliable and untrustworthy, incapable of delivering on its promises.

There are many reasons for this, but the bottom line is that the product model introduces a new, direct, and very different relationship between customers and the product teams.

As a company moves to the product model, there are some fairly significant changes to how the product teams need to interact with customers.¹

Most of those changes are not directly visible to customers, as they involve how product teams do their daily work to discover and deliver solutions.

But as you know by now, the product model relies on direct and frequent interaction between the product team and the actual users and customers.

Partly this is to gain a deeper understanding of customers' problems and the environment and context in which a successful solution needs to operate, and partly this is to test your potential solutions to make sure that solution is valuable to customers, and usable by the various types of users.

We like to encourage product teams to explain their intentions as they begin to interact directly and intensely with users and customers, as this change may be very different from the customers' perspective as well.

Most customers ...