Secret to building a customer centric culture for growth and more

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Today at a glance:

• Article: Customer-Centric Culture

• Post: Growth at all costs….NO!

• Media: B2B bubble to pop soon

• Tool: Supercharge your development speed

• Framework: Prioritise with DACI

One Article:

The Secret to Building a Customer-Centric Culture

Product innovation that genuinely moves the needle requires a deep understanding of your customers. Once you have that understanding use it to create a competitive advantage.

Leaders across the company are running from meeting to meeting – only able to develop a surface-level understanding of the problems they’re solving.

This is a dangerous mindset. A surface-level understanding of customers feels like customer-centricity, but it isn’t enough. Only understanding the surface of a problem leads to incremental solutions. And incremental solutions aren’t going to differentiate you from the competition. Reforge provides you with actionable insight, tactics, and knowledge on becoming a customer-centric organisation.

One Post:

Eddie Reynolds points out key reasons for B2B SaaS struggling to remain sustainable within the current climate. With no set strategy and alignment across companies, there needs a revamp now that the VC investments have dried up.

One Media:

​The B2B SaaS bubble is going to pop badly, and maybe soon.

This thread explains certain trends that will hamper B2B SaaS growth. With funding drying up and a potential recession in the future, people will be cutting extras, and that extra can be your service. There’s a deeper thread in this thread that supports the trend. You can read it here.

One Tool:

CircleCI is the world's largest shared continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform and the central hub where code moves from idea to delivery. It’s used to improve engineering team productivity and go to market faster.

One Framework:

The DACI decision-making framework is a model designed to improve a team’s effectiveness and speed on projects by assigning team members specific roles and responsibilities when it comes to group decisions.

Step 1: Break the project into tasks, and assign each a Driver.

After you’ve established the DACI roles among your project’s team, you’ll want to agree on a Driver to lead the overall project.

Then you’ll want to break the project down into a task-level plan. You won’t need to create deadlines or assign specific resources at this point; the goal is to get your team to agree on the set of action items to prioritise so you can start moving the project forward.

You’ll also want to assign a Driver to each of these tasks. This way, tasks are less likely to fall between the cracks because each has an advocate responsible for moving them forward.

Step 2: Assign both Approvers and Contributors to each task.

The team should agree on the Approver (ideally, one per task) and Contributors assigned to each task.

The Driver can add or remove Contributors at any time as the team progresses or the project’s needs change. But it’s better to start each task knowing the team has at least some expert sources to consult when needed.

Step 3: Define the actual workflow

Now the project’s main Driver starts developing the action plan, answering such questions as:

• Will we have a kickoff meeting? Who should attend? How often should we have team meetings once the project is underway?

• How will we work with our Contributors?

• How will we track these tasks? With a project management application like Notion or Kanban? On a spreadsheet? Using our roadmap software?

• How will we keep our Informed updated as things change with the project?

• What process should we use for our decision-making process? Should we arrange a brief meeting between our Approver and Contributors for each decision? Should the Driver pass on the team’s advice to the Approver and wait for a decision?

The DACI model helps product managers & their teams to make clear and definitive decisions to streamline and improve processes leading to faster & better decision-making.

Tim’s Hiring Zone:

You can find growth-related jobs here.