Definition
Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
Explained by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy
I’m intentionally starting with customer obsession because frankly everything starts with the customer and works backwards from there at Amazon.
That’s the way we think about our business. And it’s always been true. It’s always been palpable in the whole time that I’ve been here.
It’s part of what attracted me to Amazon 26.5 years ago, which was, you could really feel that this was a culture and a company that not just talked about doing right by customers, but walk that walk. We’re all customers of so many businesses and we all know what we’re treated like and typically companies talk about being customer focused, but rarely are. And I really think Amazon has always been. And you’ve seen it from the beginning up to now, all sorts of examples of that.
But, you know, I remember the first full year I was at Amazon, one of the big debates that year was whether or not we should have customer reviews on books detail pages. We were a books-only retailer at that point. And the debate really was because publishers didn’t want us to have customer reviews because some of them might be negative. But the reality is if you’re trying to help customers make the best possible decision for themselves on whether they want a product or not, having honest customer reviews is incredibly helpful. So we decided to have those customer reviews.
You can see that customer focus all the way up to today. Just look at what happened during the pandemic where we had this very uncertain economy where every company in the world, including Amazon, was trying to save money however they could. Most technology companies looked at that environment and said, we’re going to find a way to extract every last dollar from our customers in this tight economy. Amazon did the opposite. In our cloud computing business, in AWS, we proactively went to customers and tried to figure out how we could cost optimize for them where they could save money. So they could redeploy that money in the future on projects that actually could help their business and they could live to fight another day in a difficult economy. That’s pretty different.
And you can see it in how we do our product development here at the company as well. We won’t write lines of code until we do the working backwards documents. A press release to make sure that if we built the product, we know that it’s going to matter for customers. And then a frequently asked questions document where we really try and vet ahead of time, all the things customers care about. What problem are we trying to solve? What will customers care most about? What would they be most disappointed about if we launch with this set of features? What will they love most? All the things that make it work for customers. That’s what we’re always trying to figure out.
Now, I have also seen over time, sometimes people get confused about how competitors or economics come into play when you think about the leadership principle of customer obsession. And people wonder, well, am I being customer obsessed if I’m thinking about sustainability and economics of what I’m doing?
And you know, of course, many of us remember in the early 2000s, the company Cosmo, which promised one-hour delivery of videos to your house. They actually delivered a lot of ice cream in my house too, by the way. I really enjoyed the service. But it was not economic, and the business lasted a year or two and then it was gone. And you’re not really doing right by customers over a long period of time if you get them excited about something that you can’t sustain. So, of course, you have to think about economics when you’re thinking about what you’re building.
And, and then some people ask, well, am I being customer obsessed if I think about what competitors have offered and try to address something competitors have put out that customers like? And the reality is that if you’re trying to build the best possible customer experience, you have to be aware of what competitors are doing. And if competitors build something that we have and by the way, we’re very inventive and we’re very customer-focused, but we’re not going to build every single new feature the customers love, there are going to be others that do so as well. And if a competitor builds something that customers love, we should be aware of it and we should be inspired by it and think about how we can improve our own customer experience with what we learn from what competitors have done.
So we always are going to have to be aware of competitors and economics and building the best customer experience. But we’re going to spend most of our waking hours focused on what we know customers care most about. And the reality is that everybody at this company has not just the freedom but really the expectation to look at what customers want and figure out how we can be better and better for them every day.