Empty Chairs Aren’t Real Customers

In the article, “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” in The London Times special Agile Business Report, author Peter Archer praises online retail and cloud services multi-billionaire, Jeff Bezos for his agile leadership. Bezos, he writes, “expects everyone in his organisation to put the customer first.” As evidence of this customer focus, he describes how Bezos “is known to leave one place empty at the conference table and tells his staff they should consider the seat occupied by their customer: the most important person in the room.” 

A customer-centric approach to product development is an essential component of business agility but the performative nature of an empty chair may not be the most effective strategy to truly delight your customer.

The Significance of an Empty Chair 

The empty chair for the customer is an example of what we at Humanizing Work call a culture signal, a tangible sign given by leaders to communicate, “things are different here.” 

The question is whether the empty chair is an effective culture signal. Certainly, a persistent reminder to consider the customer can improve decision-making. I can imagine a meeting where financial or technical concerns could take center stage, with the customer—and the customer’s needs—forgotten. 

Unfortunately, the empty chair is only marginally better as a culture signal than a cliche motivational poster on the conference room wall. Effective culture signals demonstrate a tradeoff, something good that leaders are willing to give up or get worse at in order to obtain something more important. 

Unfortunately, the empty chair is only marginally better as a culture signal than a cliche motivational poster on the conference room wall.

One of the best examples of a culture signal about the importance of the customer actually comes from Amazon subsidiary Zappos. When the late Zappos CEO Tony Sheih celebrated 10+ hour customer service calls, he signaled, “great customer service is so important here that we’re willing to give up call center efficiency.” Surely there were countless customer calls that were both effective and short. Sheih could have told stories about those calls. But he didn’t. By highlighting the long calls, Sheih removed any cognitive load for call center employees about whether to prioritize customer service or efficiency. 

True Customer Connection 

Bezos’s empty chair for the customer ultimately falls short in two key ways. It fails to signal what Amazon is willing to give up to make the customer “the most important person in the room.” And, perhaps more importantly, it fails to actually get the customer perspective in the room.

The empty chair is an abstraction of a customer. Each person in a meeting is free to populate that abstraction with their own assumptions and biases. 

Connecting with actual customers confronts those assumptions and biases and can align a team’s understanding of actual customers’ real contexts, goals, needs, and pains. We love customer problem interviews as a quick, affordable way to do this. Just a half dozen interviews with typical customers can unlock tremendous understanding and empathy for a team.

How to Actually Interact With Customers 

Organizations are often wary of getting actual customers in the room, and rightly so. Any particular customer is unlikely to be representative of a broader target market and isn’t guaranteed to be helpful in a specific meeting. So, the naive improvement of putting an actual customer in the empty chair is a nonstarter.

A critical function of the scrum product owner role is to connect with a range of actual customers to generate a composite understanding of key customer segments. Those, of course, include assumptions. So, the agile move is to test those assumptions in short iterations—invite customers to sprint reviews, run product assumption tests, release frequently and monitor actual customer behavior.

All this work, by the way, is what separates the real Product Owner from the backlog administrator.

A customer-centric approach to product development is an essential component of business agility but the performative nature of an empty chair may not be the most effective strategy to truly delight your customer. 

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