10 Challenges to Building a Customer Obsessed Organization

Gothelf shares twelve areas to focus your organization to improve at being customer centric (or obsessed as he says.

It was hard distilling this list into only 10 of these anti-patterns (in fact, I failed, there are actually 12 in this article) but I feel that these are the most prevalent and the ones that, if improved, would make the most difference to organizations competing in today's uncertain, rapidly changing world and business environment.

This is a great list for leaders to use to asses their organization and see where improvements can be made.

1. Misaligned Incentives
2. Learning is not a Priority
3. No Cross-Functional Collaboration
4. Underuse of In-House Research Team
5. Lack of Humility
6. Too Much Theory X, Not Enough Theory Y
7. Agile and Process Theater
8. Fixed, Annual Planning Cycles
9. Lack of Psychological Safety
10. Teams Don't Understand their Business Model
11. Bonus 1: No Access to Customers
12. Bonus 2: Teams don't know how to do Product Discovery

Very good areas to focus.