Customer-facing mission and vision bring effectiveness to the leadership. During our class of Leadeship, we learnt about the Five Questions Plan for businesses.
- What is our mission?
- Who is our customer?
- What does the customer value?
- What are our results?
- What is our plan?
I consider identifying customers and their needs the most important.
I am recently watching a TV series called “Silicon Valley”. It’s a parody of Silicon Valley culture, focusing on Richard Hendricks, a programmer who founded a startup company based on his algorithm, and his struggles trying to run his company. One impressive clip is the new CEO Jack Barker, who replaced Richard, argued: “Sales and engineering are the two pillars of the Conjoined Triangles of Success. Engineering and sales must work together to decide what to build.”. This is very true. Without input from customers, Richard and his engineering colleagues produced a very “engineered” product. The technology is fantastic and brings breakthroughs to the industry. But customers don’t buy it. Normal people can’t understand how it works, because the product’s novelty exceeded their common sense. Terrible user experiences can never maintain users.
According to our courses and what I have seen from Silicon Valley, I am more aware that I should value customer needs as our mission and thus make our strategy effective and efficient. I am going to start interviews for my capstone project next week. We have a good vision of automating officers’ daily work by a virtual assistant on our software. But the first step should be understanding officers’ work and finding what they value most from our product.