Just because you interview your customers doesn’t mean you’re customer centric.
As you go through the process of developing your products, you may not realize it, but you’re stripping away what your customer (demand) actually wants.
You strip away, you force them to work through your processes. It becomes a supply-side thing.
Each function takes what it wants, they push their own agenda.
And what’s finally left is a shell. Customers may get some benefit from it, but not the entire benefit they originally were looking for.
This isn’t a critique; it’s a reality of how most organizations are structured. Especially in large CPG companies, where processes are optimized for speed, scale, and efficiency.
Let’s say you a Product Manager or Brand Manager. When you’re managing a portfolio, launching five to ten new products a year, and trying to hit distribution targets, it’s easy to believe that being customer-focused is enough. You’ve done the insight work. You’ve run concept tests. You’ve got a compelling benefit on pack.
But here’s the question to ask yourself: was the customer ever at the center of the process?
Or were they a point of reference along the way?
It leads me to a distinction we see time and time again: confusing consumer-focused design with consumer-centric design.
Confusing consumer-focused design with consumer-centric design.
You’ll hear companies say they’re consumer-centric, but what we usually see is that they’re focused on the consumer — but they don’t build around the consumer experience. Instead, they build around an insight.
The problem with building around insights
What is an insight? An insight is a thing we notice about a consumer. It’s often a task they struggle with, something we pick up in interviews, or through surveys and concept tests.
The conversation usually goes like this: “Would you like this product if it were faster?” The consumer says yes. The company latches on. They start hypothesizing what “faster” means, build a feature, and call it a win.
We call this insight-focused. You spot something, build something, and then scale it.
But here’s the problem: what you build doesn’t always connect to what the consumer is actually trying to accomplish. They may see some benefit but chances are, you are actually risking making it harder, not easier, for them to make progress in their lives.
Being consumer-centric is different.
It’s not about what people say they want. It’s about understanding what they’re trying to do, and the progress they’re trying to make. And then, and only then, designing with that progress at the center.
It starts with behavior, not aspiration. Real behavior is messy, it’s complex, and it’s often contradictory behavior – especially if you don’t understand the context it happens in.
Why are they buying this product today?
What are they hoping it helps them achieve?
What are the outcomes they care about?
How do they measure success?
What are they willing to trade off?
These are demand-side questions.
But being consumer-centric doesn’t stop at uncovering demand. You’ve got to prototype in the real world. Not just A/B test messages or tweak packaging. You’ve got to learn: when I change something, how does it affect the consumer’s experience and the progress they want to make?
Another question to consider is how does the product work in different environments? Because even if you’ve mapped the consumer’s world and tested in-market, you’ve still got your own bias to contend with. Are you really seeing it through their eyes? Or are you pulling it back through the lens of what your brand needs to say, or what your function needs to deliver?
This is where empathy comes in. Real empathy, or having an empathetic perspective, means being able to see tradeoffs the way your customer does.
Another big hurdle in your mission to be customer centric is the ability to make trade-offs.
Because if every decision tips in favor of what’s easier for the company — faster to produce, cheaper to ship, better margin — and the customer ends up doing more work, then you’re not customer-centric. You’re customer-focused.
And let’s be honest. If the consumer is the one always giving something up, – you’re not serving them. You’re asking them to serve your process.
Being consumer-centric means asking: are we designing this product, this experience, this brand, in a way that makes it easier for our consumer to make the progress they seek? Or are we designing it to work better for us?
Customer centricity isn’t a strategy. It’s looking at things from the lens of the customer.
It’s moving from What can we sell them? to What are they trying to do — and how can we help them do it better, faster, with fewer compromises?
And if that means saying no to a feature, changing how you define value, or challenging how your teams work — then that’s the work.
You can’t outsource that to the research team. You can’t fix it in a creative brief. It has to be lived across product, brand, R&D, sales, and operations. Everyone talking the same shared language.
Because when every function starts pulling in its own direction, the product gets hollowed out. The demand gets stripped away. And what’s left is that shell I mentioned at the beginning that sort of works — but doesn’t really work.