The “Customer Comes First” Operating System

Follow Me Home; National Sales Tour; Customer Communities/Conferences

When Intuit was still a 1-product, 100-person startup, founder and CEO Scott Cook taught us what he learned during his early career as a product manager for Proctor and Gamble in Cincinatti. I believe he was one of the first to focus and bring a “customer first” mentality to software companies in Silicon Valley.

I still pay forward these lessons today to any founder or exec team who will listen.

Today, I’ll take it a layer deeper and suggest a new “Customer Operating System” to help turn “Customers Come First” from a high level slogan to actual company activities at all levels of the employee and leadership base.

I’ve never seen these lessons fail when applied. I brought these “customer first” techniques to Netflix and Mozilla and coach them when I can in every other startup I’ve interacted with.

I strongly believe that almost every successful company who has navigated from startup to unicorn has the foundations of being very close to their customer. I also strongly believe the opposite is true. Technology first companies or companies that state “customers don’t know what they want” and “we know better than our customer” are bound for the killing fields of Silicon Valley.

At the core of what I’m now calling the “Customer Operating System” are 3 simple words and 2 key sentences.

Customers Come First.

If it’s good for the customer, it’s good for the business.

If it’s not good for the customer, it will eventually break the business.

Thank you Captain Obvious!

But I remain surprised how often the core of the company problem is not being close enough to your customer. I’ve come to the conclusion that many don’t know how.

This simple concept is therefore worthy of a post but also worthy of my attempt to create an actual repeatable customer operating system.

Why Startups Lose Customer Touchpoints As They Scale

The classic phrase gradually, silently, and then suddenly applies here:

• New layers of management appear.

• Product becomes technology roadmap driven instead of customer requirement driven.

• Actual customer conversations get replaced by internal naval gazing operating metrics and dashboards.

• And the most dangerous I hear? “We know what our customers want.”

The Best Customer Focused Companies?

• Design customer touchpoint rituals at every product stage

• Talk about the Customer Journey constantly

• Think and communicate “Customer 1st” not only to the company but most importantly to the customer whenever issues arise

• Create extremely valuable Customer Communities

The Powerful Questions To Ask Your Team Today

Three Questions

Using my Powerful Questions Framework, every leadership team should revisit these 3 questions quarterly:

1. How close are we really to our customers?

Evidence-based, not belief-based. When was the last time the CEO and the Exec Team actually spoke to customer(s)?

2. Who owns our customer engagement?

If the answer is “everyone,” then the answer is actually “no one.”

3. What are our customer-backed rituals?

What do we actually DO to prove we are close to our customers? Specifically. Go ahead, I’m listening.

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Cook’s Customer Operating System:

5 Customer Sub-Systems

Below are the actual customer rituals we used at Intuit, plus two cultural programs that became legendary. These forced every employee, regardless of title, to stay connected to real customers using the product in the real world. I participated in each one of these and they imprinted “customer” on my personal startup DNA.

1) Follow Me Home (FMH)

The most powerful customer-learning mechanism I’ve ever experienced.

We (as in the entire company of 400 people) went to actual customer homes of those using our actual product (Quicken and QuickBooks at the time). The FMH system required us to only watch quietly and take detailed notes to pass back to our product and engineering teams.

We were not allowed to help the customer as they struggled through various parts of the product as they used it in the “real world”.

Every employee was also required to be a “phone customer service rep” for 1 week a year (no internet or email service existed back then).

The product/engineer teams then prioritized the “customer requirements” for the next product version after pattern matching over a few hundred customer interactions over a very short period of time. FMH produced decades of product improvements because it revealed friction customers didn’t even know how to articulate.

You may not be able to actually visit your customer’s homes or even have a customer support department but the framing of figuring out how to communicate 1:1 with customers is something I highly encourage you to figure out. Get creative.

2) The National Sales Tour: “Everyone Sells for a Week”

Every year, we sent every employee, yes, every single one of us to a major city of their choice (requirement was you had to stay with a friend or family member - to save the company money).

We all went into the major software stores of the day (Comp USA, Babbages, Egghead, etc) to speak to the store managers and to rearrange the boxes on the shelves to make Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax front and center and to watch how customers bought the product. We were all sales reps for the week and were armed with key scripts and marketing materials from our sales and marketing departments.

Today, there may not be a “store” but the concept remains the same of having every employee at all levels (especially the execs) attend “Sales Calls.”

While FMH (Follow-Me-Home) taught us where the real “bugs” were in the product post sale, our National Sales Tour taught us what the roadblocks were to customers actually buying the product.

3) Customer Journey Mapping: With a Real Owner

At Intuit, we defined and operationalized the original “customer journey.”

We built cross-functional customer journey maps showing:

• How customers discovered the product

• How they decide to buy

• What they did next on each screen

• Where they get stuck and were creating product friction

• What they told their friends and family about

Intuit made exec team leaders accountable for owning the customer journey from the Sales Department linking to the Marketing Department linking to the Engineering/Product Department and linking to the Customer Service and Support Department.

There was no way for finger-pointing and department siloing to occur. We even designed joint compensation incentive programs cross functionally. We made sure the cross functional leaders (Head of Product + Head of Engineering + Head of Marketing) spoke as 1 voice and appeared “on stage” together at all hands meeting. I have strong memories of 2, 3, and sometimes 4 execs on stage in front of the company talking about how they work together with their customer at the first set of operational hand-offs.

We published weekly and monthly reports and led all quarterly offsites and QBRs (quarterly business reviews) starting and ending with the customer journey.

4) Customer Community

In the early-mid 90s, Intuit didn’t have the internet, websites, or customer community software platforms. We were shipping our product on floppy discs and CDs after all. Our version of “customer communities” required in-person observations and structured programs.

Today, companies have a massively more scalable tool called the world-wide-web and still aren’t using this powerful tool very well.

A Customer Community is much more than a support forum or a feature request list.

A Great Customer Community?

• A digital town square for customer feedback

• Real-time focus groups

• Product walk throughs and tutorials ideally created by other customers who are incentivized to share how they use your product

• Customer “tips and tricks” treasure chest of data. Customers love learning from other customers.

• Roll your own idea here

The value of a great customer community is not passive content published to customers or quarterly surveys of these communities. It’s the unfiltered real-time conversations that are happening daily.

When customers talk to each other and to the company, three powerful things happen:

1. You hear their language… not yours.
   This shapes your messaging and positioning far more effectively than any marketing brainstorm ever could.

2. You see their real workflows, hacks, and workarounds.
   Those product gaps? Yes those. Those friction points. Yes those. Those contextual nuances that are hard to replicate in a “survey.”

3. You get the “long tail” truth.
   Customers tell your support team or sales team one thing. They tell other customers the real thing.

Yes, dig for this and you will strike gold.

Customer Communities Are Your Strategic Weapon

1. Customers learn from each other faster than they ever will from your marketing or sales messaging or your customer engagement team.

You will achieve true ROI in lower customer support costs, increased organic product marketing and faster customer onboarding.

2. Company leaders need to be customer moderators vs product broadcasters.

When executives including CFOs and COOs quietly monitor ongoing discussions, they gain:

• Raw behavioral insights

• Feature prioritization signals

• Patterns of frustration

• Patterns of delight

• Real customer vocabulary

• Early warning indicators of churn

These insights feed back into your Strategy–Structure–Execution system with clarity and precision.

3. A Customer Community is the ultimate customer research engine.

No incentives needed. No artificial environments. Customers simply talk and you listen.

The natural conversations that happen in a healthy Customer Community are more valuable than any paid research study, and if you listen deeply you will hear:

• What customers wish the product did

• What they ignore

• What they brag about

• What they teach each other

• What they fear

• What they struggle with

• What they’ve hacked together that you should build natively

Hint Hint: The Seeds of Your Future Product Roadmap Begin Here!

CFO + COO Role in Customer Community Design

Open your checkbook and allocate your $ to creating this Customer Community.

If you want to be a key architect of the business, then invest in it, design it, build it, and create your new customer insights engine.

Now you can turn this customer data into customer insights and into customer decisions. Data > Insights > Actions - your new Customer Operating System.

5) Customer Conferences

In the early to mid 90s and still existing today, there were only big annual conferences that all companies attended (Comdex, CES, others).

Today, the big companies (Salesforce, Oracle, Apples WWDC, etc) hold their own huge customer conferences. Take a page out of their book and invest in your own smaller annual customer conference. Bill.com, Netsuite, Twilio and many others all used this very valuable customer playbook with huge ROIs.

Very few startups invest in bringing their customers together early enough. But those that do are building powerful communities extremely quickly. Key examples are the recent conferences from the Operators Guild that Casey and Molly and team are running, Rillet (Nicholas and Stephen), Campfire (John G), Runway (Siqi), and the a16z demo events that Ivan Makarov is running extremely successfully.

A Customer Conference

For decades, the world’s most iconic companies have built empires around this idea:

• Salesforce → Dreamforce

• Oracle → Oracle World

• Apple → WWDC

• Google → I/O

• Microsoft → Ignite / Build

These events aren’t as much “marketing events,” they’re other customer community events where customers, partners, and company employees all:

• Teach each other

• Share success stories

• Reveal pain points

• Build a deeper community network

• Strengthen brand identity and culture

• Drive roadmap influence

Startups often assume they’re “too small” for a customer conference.

Sorry, that’s just wrong and penny wise-pound foolish type thinking.

You’re never too small to bring your customers together.

In fact, the smaller you are, the more critical it is.

Why Customer Conferences Matter; Especially for Startups

1. Customers Learn from Each Other

This is the magic.

Customers learn 100x faster from each other than they do from you.

They share:

• Workflows

• Hacks

• Best practices

• Integrations

• Creative solutions

• How they’ve structured their teams

• How they drive ROI with your product

These are insights you cannot manufacture internally.

2. Employees See the Customers They Work For

• This ignites a new customer first culture inside your team.

• Your engineers talk to real customers. You can’t get this anywhere else.

• Product managers receive live feedback.

• Customer Engagement takes learnings from 1-3 intense days to prioritize their next quarter’s initiatives.

• Executive Leadership hears the truth without filters.

• Everyone is reconnected to Company Purpose and Customer Impact.

3. You Get Gold-Like Customer and Product Insight

No survey can match the quality of insights gained from:

• Roundtables

• Q&A sessions

• Product demos

• Roadmap previews

• Customer story panels

• 1:1 customer conversations

Your company walks away with a validated roadmap, a clear prioritization reset, and a renewed sense of direction.

How to Build a Startup-Scale Customer Conference

You don’t need Moscone Center.

You need intentionality.

Start small:

• 5-10 customers

• Local venue

• One-day format

• 2–3 customer-led sessions

• 1 roadmap keynote

• 3 hands-on breakouts

• A simple “Ask Me Anything” with founders and product leaders

This is the mini-version of Dreamforce; the startup edition.

Over time, scale it into:

• 25-50 Customers

• Regional Customer Groups

• Quarterly customer meetups

• A flagship annual customer summit

You’re not building a 1-off event.

You’re building a customer-powered learning ecosystem.

Why CFOs and COOs Must Champion Customer Conferences

This is not a marketing initiative nor a sales effort. This is a company investment.

CFOs + COOs are the lead investors: The ROI?

• De-Risk the Product Roadmap

• Operationalize learnings into next quarter’s and/or next year’s planning

A Customer Conference pays for itself 10x. You’ll see it in:

• Renewal rates

• Upsell opportunities

• Product improvements

• Reduced churn

• Market positioning

• Community formation

• Brand trust

• Employee engagement

Trust the ROI: These events are one of the few “high-cost line items” that is actually a multiplier, not an expense.

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How CFOs and COOs Can Help Architect the Customer Operating System

Lead with my Strategy–Structure–Execution philosophy. Remember, you sit at this unique intersection of all three.

I can’t tell you how many times I still see customer data being silo’d and filtered inside a startup and even a later stage company.

Product sees one part of the customer journey.

Sales sees another and many times blames Marketing.

Engineering finger points at Sales for selling something we haven’t built.

Onboarding and Customer Engagement sees a whole other side of the customer.

And the leaders and their departments are not talking to each other with a customer first mentality.

As an operator, a CFOs or a COO, you see the full system. You see:

• Customer Pipeline Issues

• Customer Onboarding Friction

• Customer Churn Signals

• Customer Recurring Revenue and Expansion Patterns

• Customer Value Creation

• Customer Value Capture

• Customer Value Destruction

I’ll continue to shout that the CFO/COO is the natural operating architect for the company and it all starts and ends with building the internal operating system from a Customer First Philosophy.

You will know when you get it right and will certainly know when you get it wrong. You can feel the customer heartbeat of the company and build that into higher quality and higher velocity decisions. You can drive company alignment from the customer backwards to operational ownership.

These five programs alone can create a moat most competitors never build.

QUARTERLY CUSTOMER JOURNEY SCORECARD: CFO/COO LED

Try to do this at least every quarter, certainly no later than every 6 months. Leadership should ask these questions:

The 12-Question Cook’s PlayBooks Journey Review

1. Where are we losing customers?

2. Where are customers teaching each other?

3. What are our customer’s biggest friction points?

4. What do Follow-Me-Home Customer Sessions reveal?

5. Top 3 things we learned from our Customer Community?

6. What did customers say at the conference?

7. What is the #1 avoidable loss reason?

8. What is our fastest-growing workflow?

9. Who are our best customers and why?

10. Who are our worst customers and why?

11. What are we overbuilding/underbuilding?

12. What is our #1 single most important customer insight this quarter?

Build Your Customer Moat: Get Started Today

Moats built around the customer and their loyalty is something that AI and competitors can’t copy.

Competitors can try to compete with product features or pricing but a strong loyal customer base who knows they are getting what they pay for is more valuable than any product or pricing sleight of hand.

The greatest companies ever built truly understand this and the ones that fail, failed to ever understand being this close to the customer.

So, copy/paste the above and start building your own Customer Operating System starting today.

SPEAKER / KEYNOTE OPPORTUNITY: Book Me To Talk About This.

If you want me to personally come in to deliver this keynote at your next company all-hands or leadership team offsite, contact me. Yes, it’s that important!

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