The most powerful question in business
We sat down with Evelyn Huang, a leading product expert, to uncover her revolutionary approach to business growth through customer-centricity. In this exclusive Q&A, she shares her proven strategies for building lasting customer relationships and driving business transformation.
There's a question I ask companies. It brings focus and clarity to their mission and processes.
Let me explain the philosophy behind my approach, and how I follow up to execute extraordinary changes in ambitious enterprises.
I work with companies that want to create a breakthrough product. They want to begin by talking about the product and their goal.
I flip it. I ask a basic question:
“Are you and your customer in love?”
This response is always visceral. I hear the word Wow a lot. And that's what I want. It's a provocative question.
I follow up with a clarification:
“I'm not only asking if your customers love you. The question is two-way. Are you and your customers in love?”
The response to this question reveals a lot about the company. Maybe they'll say that yes, there is mutual love between us and our customers, but I'm worried about how to sustain that over the next three years. This is a great bit of context from where we can start working.
Maybe they'll say, some of the customers love us, but I'm more worried about the lack of love in our internal culture. That tells us what we need to work on.
Others say, No, there's no love. Then we have a Product Market Fit mission.
What seems like an abstract question is in fact one of the best diagnostic tools I've ever seen. It opens up the conversation immediately, skips past the numbers, and reveals what a company really needs to focus on. It works for startups to Fortune 500 companies.
I also ask staff outside the C-Suite. You can imagine the variety of responses here. The board may feel that 'Of course we and our customers are in love!' Then the sales team offer their frank version. They reveal problems with the customer relationship. It fleshes out the picture so we develop a really clear picture of where the company stands.
Fixing the problem
Diagnosis is the start. What really matters next is how to help a company change for the better.
I split solutions into three categories. They are:
a) Mindset change
b) Improving skillsets
c) Governance and organisational change
To enable mindset change, I rely on storytelling. Let me illustrate with an example. Capital One, for many years the most innovative bank in the US, wanted to improve the mindset of the company. The CEO produced a mission statement to bring humanity back to banking.
We wanted the workforce to lead this change in mindset. So we turned to storytelling. The CEO does an annual roadshow, where he talks to all business units for five or six hours. He was excellent at it. That gave him a chance to explain what he wanted directly, using stories to illustrate his vision for the culture at Capital One, and we used this as a platform for him to cascade down the mindsets of “focus on the human” and “bias towards action.”. Simultaneously, we created a version of a TED Talk called a PAM Talk, which stood for People and Money. We invested in high-quality production values. We hired a coach to teach them to create a story in the TED Talk style. On the same stage the CEO used, these product managers would tell stories about their customers and their process, demonstrating the mindsets embraced from the ground up. Storytelling captures hearts. It's a terrific mechanism for starting a change in mindset.
Improving skillsets needs a long term talent strategy, with two components - who/what do you train and who/what do you bring in. At the energy company bp, we created an internal flywheel to spread training across the organisation. A tactic that's worked for me is giving the catalysts a title to recognise their status. In one organisation, we called them the Big Kahunas. They are the champions of the issue they've mastered. It's fun but effective. Everyone knows who to turn to for advice!It starts with a third-party facilitator. As soon as you build a community of practice, you take your star students and turn them into the teacher. Soon, your company is no longer reliant on outsiders. It has internalised the lessons and is self-sustaining. In addition, you often need to embed new people from outside the organization who already work in the way you need and have them model for others - as full-time team members, not as coaches and trainers.
The final element is the structural change. If you execute a mindset change and improve skillsets, you are going to find your old organisational chart and routine processes don’t work. This is a big topic, so let me just offer a bit of guidance: don’t overindex on changing the org chart right off the bat. Instead identify the specific “barnacles” that are slowing down the moving ship. For example, both Capital One and bp are highly regulated industries with legacy processes that set the bar for approval. These are predicated on the assumption you’ll be affecting millions of customers on day one. At Capital One, we had to create alternate launch approval pathways that loosen constraints for a limited number of customers to quickly reach them, get feedback, and iterate on the product until it is ready for a wider audience. At bp, budget approval cycles assume a launch to millions of customers. We’ve had to disaggregate funding into two categories, discovery and delivery, and create more frequent operating check-ins across the portfolio to pivot funding to those products where we’re seeing strong signal.
Keep iterating
This diagnostic and three-category structure to fixing problems is my overarching methodology. But my final advice is not to be dogmatic. Throw ideas around, try them, see what works, and iterate. The same mindset of experimentation that we espouse in product work applies to organization change!
Let me give you an example of the way in which change be affected by sheer creativity.
I worked at Sunrun, the biggest solar installer in the United States. Instead of sticking with the more traditional Chief Marketing Officer title, we changed my title to Chief Experience Officer as an indication of our new direction. One of the most productive things we did was analyse the customer experience and identify a specific moment that matters . When the installer arrives at the home of the customer, it’s often the first time the customer has seen a Sunrun representative in person, and to be honest, they may have forgotten it was the day of install. Our installers were keenly focused on efficiency, and immediately launched into more technical questions, such as “where’s your breaker?” We role played with our installers and had them step into the shoes of the homeowner - say, a mom of two, who is rushing to get the children to school, when the solar installer arrives. The role play opened their eyes to how the customers saw them. That quick exercise created empathy for the customer and shifted both the tone and the script for on-site conversation. It was the trigger for a wholesale change in the way the market saw Sunrun.
Overall, you should be hugely ambitious in the targets you set for your organization. With the right approach you can create self-sustaining changes which ripple into every aspect of the company.
It all starts with that fundamental question: are you and your customer in love with each other.
About Evelyn:
Evelyn Huang is an expert in customer experience, product and design strategy. In her role as Chief Customer Experience Officer/CMO at Sunrun Evelyn played an instrumental role in propelling the company’s ascent to a $2B market cap.