The Customer-Driven Culture: A Microsoft Story

Chapter 5. Build Leaders That Build Your Culture

Rather than have a culture that celebrates “failing fast,” you should consider building a culture that celebrates “learning fast.” Celebrating experiments that can be directly tied to revenue results is easy; it’s tangible. However, trying to uncover learning that isn’t directly tied to a revenue number is much more difficult. These learnings are just as valuable because they invalidate our hypotheses and help us avoid costly mistakes.

Yet, so many product teams still celebrate only when a product or feature ships on time.

I’ve talked with many product team members who become frustrated because they’ve felt like they did all the requisite customer research, but it didn’t result in a business opportunity. They feel their work is wasted because it didn’t produce a product to sell or a feature to ship. What they don’t often appreciate (and I often remind them) is that they helped move the organization forward. While their experiments might not have produced a product worthy of putting into the market, it did give us other valuable insights. Learning what’s not worth building is just as valuable as learning what is.

Throughout this book, I’ve made the case that being customer driven is actually being learning driven. Therefore, a customer-driven culture is one that builds leaders who are willing to learn.

In this chapter, we explore why developing leaders who demonstrate the vital behaviors of your culture is a useful hack in building ...