Making customer-centricity a number the whole business unit could move

The company was modernizing every organizational dimension at once, and one of its most important business units stepped forward to pilot not just agile delivery but a deeper shift toward customer-centricity in its product and service teams. The premise was strategic, not cosmetic: being customer-centric was framed as a business strategy, putting the customer at the center to build long-term, more profitable relationships, rather than a single team, project, or program.

The brief I was given was deliberately hard to fake: don't just preach the culture, measure it. Establish pillars that reflect the balance between business interests and customer needs, then track each team's maturity against them so the organization could see where its “bets” were weak, decide on evidence instead of intuition, and spend its people's time on solutions that would actually compete in the market. My first leadership decision was therefore to convert an aspirational value into a scored instrument, something a skeptical executive could read, defend, and act on.

“Establish and measure pillars that reflect the balance between business interests and customer needs, aimed at evolving the teams in the concepts of customer-centricity.”

The initiative ran with a small core team driving planning, execution, and analysis, backed by executive and director sponsorship that handled strategic alignment and received the status reports. I owned coordination, planning, and the overall progress of the work.

It was deliberately time-boxed to six weeks across three phases:

1. Kickoff & alignment — present the initiative to the BU's executives, ground it in external references (C2 Report / FGV·Fox, CCO / Gartner, ICC / Livework), and build the interview scripts.
2. Two execution waves — a qualitative diagnostic followed by a quantitative measurement.
3. Measurement & cadence — score, version the Client-Centric Score v1.0, check in with the directorate, and hand off suggested action plans and the first OKR.

The first wave was intentionally qualitative, designed to calibrate the instrument before scaling it. I used a convenience sample with two screening rules, people who had been in the BU more than six months (so they had lived the changes) and people whose role involved product or business decisions and ran interviews with executives and with the tribes' technical leadership (PMs, POs, Tech Leads, UX Leads). Eighteen participants across five business verticals.

The interviews surfaced the questions teams were really wrestling with, clustered around discovery (how to bring data into faster, better decisions; how to give teams autonomy without top-down pressure) and delivery (how to consolidate product-design practice; how to keep a continuous listening loop with customers; how to strike better working agreements with analytics, marketing, and tech). Out of that, working with the executives, I defined the four pillars that became the spine of the score each graded on a 1–5 maturity scale:

1. Strategic Customer Vision — a clear, shared view of the customer experience and journey, with well-defined incremental improvement plans integrated into the verticals.
2. Design Excellence — methods and tools reflecting good design practice (design system, frameworks, testing), tuned to each vertical and standardized across teams.
3. Metrics & Insights — customer needs and experiences accessible to everyone, with prioritization driven by metrics tracked consistently.
4. Implementation & Structure — the resources, technical infrastructure, and experimentation processes needed to actually change how verticals work.

“As a general intention, as culture, as a habit everyone understanding the need and the importance is already a very valid start. But I feel there's still some ground to cover before we truly put it into practice, at every level, myself included.”

The second wave made the diagnosis defensible. I moved from a convenience sample to a stratified probabilistic one: 108 respondents at 95% confidence and a 3% margin of error. The survey was built in SurveyMonkey and each vertical reinforced completion with its teams; meanwhile, interview sessions ran in parallel. The crucial methodological decision was to cross-check the quantitative scores against the interview perceptions, specifically to dampen the well-known distortion of teams rating themselves high “automatically.” Each of the four pillars was explored through six questions (24 in total), probing the teams' maturity and self-perception on customer-centricity.

Before reporting, I agreed two reporting dimensions with leadership so the results would drive progressive change rather than defensiveness. Results were cut general → specific (a business-unit-level view and a vertical-level view, so executives saw the whole while each leader saw their own contribution) and short → long term (so each vertical could commit to moving the pillars it had the resources to move).

At the BU level the overall score landed at 2.75 / 5, which gave every team a shared north star to locate themselves against. The vertical-level cuts then made the gaps concrete, for example, the SaaS vertical (Business 03) scored 2.25, with specific weaknesses: no critical mass of experiments or a “repository” of learnings from shipped features, thin cross-backlog integration with other verticals, and a need to make competitive analysis and usage-engagement metrics routine.

Intellectual-honesty note that I kept in the reporting: the assessment became more reliable in the second round, because by then people had actually lived the pillars while executing their action plans, so the instrument and the behavior change reinforced each other rather than the score being a one-time snapshot.

Two artifacts outlived the six weeks:

1. A timeframe-classified action plan — an extensive compilation of recommended actions sorted into short, medium, and long term, so each vertical could sequence the work it had committed to.
2. A strategic OKR for Q2 and Q3 — a single objective leaders could track through the quarter, with key results that tied maturity to behavior: experiments permeating roughly 60% of new solutions for strategic markets (up from a 12% baseline of experiments vs. features shipped); verticals climbing from medium maturity (level 3 across most verticals) toward high maturity (level 4); and, in Q3, teams required to test solutions with 3–5 customers before closing a delivery cycle, with the Client-Centric Score re-run at quarter end, which reached 76%.

“Continuous understanding of our customers, focused on incremental improvements, makes our solutions more loved by them.”

The work changed how the business unit operated and showed up in its numbers across Q2 and Q3:

1. Cross-team flow. — Teams began running more cross-backlog and cross-roadmap initiatives, so the communication and coordination ahead of managerial strategy meetings flowed better and stayed focused on results.
2. Headcount justified. — The diagnosis gave the BU evidence that it lacked product-focused headcount, Group Product Managers, Product Designers and UX Researchers, to raise operational efficiency, turning a felt shortage into a justified ask.
3. NPS +14. — Customer Service and Marketing estimated the BU's global NPS rose 14 points, from 62 to 76, on products launched in the period.
4. Climate 56% → 89%. — As teams executed their action plans, the employee climate survey climbed from 56% to 89% satisfaction.
5. +12% return on Q3 launches. — The Go-To-Market team estimated a 12% increase in return on the new products and services launched in Q3 versus the same period in prior years, a positive revenue impact.
6. A deliberate trade-off. — Time-to-launch rose about 20% (~5 extra days per cycle), because each vertical committed to revising its Definition of Done to require customer testing before shipping. Slower releases were the chosen price of evidence-based delivery.

“A better way to follow up, once we've adjusted the revenue-focused behaviors is to talk about our deliveries: to understand how a delivery was made, what the customer's original pain was, and how we reached the solution. It's far less about criticism or punishment and much more about directing our effort toward reflecting on the process.”