Essential Mindsets to be Customer Centric
Product Excellence: Unspoken skills needed for customer driven innovation

Customer centricity is one of the most important but misunderstood skills for Product Managers. Human-centered design, design thinking, customer obsession, customer-driven innovation, and discovery are all terms that are written widely. But the mindsets required are rarely talked about. Before we dig into the mindsets, let’s understand what customer centricity truly means
❌ It is NOT meeting or interviewing a few customers. A lot of teams get energized meeting a few customers and walk away feeling like their lives have changed. That can be true but building customer-centric products goes way beyond this initial inspiration.✔️Customer focus needs to continue for long after that and it translates into iterative and continuous discovery.
❌Customer-centric product innovation is NOT just a wall of bright-colored post-it notes. ✔️It is more about spending all the time needed in understanding the customer problems that we can solve.
❌ Customer centricity is NOT asking customers what they want and then building it. ✔️It is learning about a much broader context of customers and distilling into their unmet needs.
Product Managers who believe that they know all the answers are quick to judge customers, get excited after just one customer meeting, and start building without thinking first. They do not just jeopardize their own product but in the long run, they jeopardize their team and their own career.
I have taught and coached “Discovery” best practices to dozens of teams and hundreds of individuals. Through this work, I have observed that those who have the following mindsets do better at building better products. Marketing leading innovation and radical innovation comes when PMs and teams have the following mindsets when gaining inspiration from customers.
1. Empathy
Empathy comes from a deep understanding of people, their joys, their struggles, their lives, their environments, their neighborhoods, and all of their contexts. Teams that gain empathy take the extra steps to solve for their customers even if it means additional work, going out of their comfort zone, pitching to their leaders, influencing others, investing their own money to build a company, and anything else that needs to be done. Empathy goes beyond the shared perspective of emotions combined with a will to solve their problems.
💡 How to be more empathetic? You can read more about how to develop radical empathy in my previous post.
“A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can shift the way we think about something and may serve as a catalyst for change.” - Warren Berger
2. The art of questioning
In his book, “A More Beautiful Question”, Warren Berger shows how questions can help guide us to brilliant decisions and solutions. When we can come up with questions and maintain a sense of curiosity, we will be able to identify immense opportunities for customers and ourselves.
💡 How to develop this skill?
Similar to brainstorming, work with your team to generate questions through a “question-storming” exercise
Follow the 5 Whys exercise and ask Why until you get to the root
Generate a set of standard questions that you can apply to all situations like Why did the person do this? How did they do this? What is getting in the way of their task completion? What motivates them? etc.,
Try and always question the status quo by never accepting things as they are.
“Fall in love with the problem not the solution”
3. Love for the problem
You might have heard that you should fall in love with the problem and not the solution. It is critical to remember the"why", and the customer's pain points. People who have the patience to spend time identifying problems do better than those who are impatient and want to ideate solutions. Brainstorming, ideation, and the building is fun. But such impatience will lead us to spend cycles trying to solve a wrong problem. We might end up missing out on the next big innovation because we weren't patient enough to spend time understanding the exact problem. Incomplete data collection and analysis are not going to be helpful. Identifying the right and most important problems will help a lot with prioritization and focus which are both key to successful teams.
💡 How to develop a love for the problem?
Staying focused on the problem and not getting carried away by the solution will be a hard but important practice
Referring back to the problems throughout Discovery is another way to ensure you stay with the problem.
4. Creativity
Creativity is fun! More importantly, it helps solve customer problems, build successful solutions, and bring success to your business and you. Creativity exists all around us and in everybody. Creativity is more than designing or UX. You might not even be good at drawing stick figures but you can be brilliant at coming up with ideas for solutions.
Creativity is often considered synonymous with Innovation but like we have seen in this post, being creative with solutions is just not enough for successful innovation.
💡 How to develop creativity?
First, believe in yourself that creativity and innovation are not limited.
Don’t be afraid of failure. Keep ideating and trying
Observe and deconstruct others’ ideas
Ideate with others and build upon their ideas. Instead of “No, but” try “Yes, And” to build upon the idea. This will
5. Collaboration
The true power of customer-driven innovation comes from when teams of diverse people work together. I find that people who are humble and approach each problem with a sense of collaboration rise to the top. They believe in the power of teams and the strength of different perspectives. They work with the rest of their team to come up with great solutions. Another aspect of humility also comes from being open to listening to all the ways their idea would fail. This helps them gather continuous feedback, iterate, and improve their products. It allows great innovators to build-learn-iterate towards building successful products that customers love.
💡 How to better collaborate?
This is probably the simplest to practice. Remembering that individual ideas are never better than team ideas will ensure you collaborate
Never ideate alone. Even if an idea strikes during deep thinking time, work with your team to build upon it
6. Growth Mindset
Individuals who have a growth mindset and are willing to learn and stretch themselves seem to be naturally better at the principles of human-centered design. They are open-minded to learning new insights, new ways of product development, etc, I have seen several people transform and grow by learning the practice and applying it to their everyday life. There are others who refuse to learn this skill and miss out on learning a great skill. They also are great at iterative learning. They don't need to put the perfect product out. They continuously learn from their customers, and pivot if needed to launch and scale great products.
💡 How to develop a growth mindset?
Be open to different ways of thinking
Spend time questioning what you believe and learn to build upon it
Ask for feedback
Always be learning new
Reframe your challenges into opportunities
Reflect daily on what you can do to improve
7. Servant Leadership
Those who put their customers first and their team before themselves thrive. They always shine and build amazing products because their goal is to serve their customers and their teams.
💡 How to develop servant leadership?
Put the needs of others before you
Develop empathy
Give more than you receive
Are there other traits that you have seen? Please add in comments so that I can learn other perspectives.
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