Scott Guirlinger
Product Design & Organizational Leadership
Product Design & Organizational Leadership
Challenge
Product teams had access to customer feedback, but not necessarily customer understanding. Insights were scattered across support cases, implementation projects, account management relationships, training engagements, and occasional research activities. As a result, product decisions were often made using incomplete information, and opportunities to learn from customers were easy to miss.
Approach
My years in support, consulting, services, and training taught me that customers rarely experience organizations the way organizations see themselves. Customers experience outcomes.
Reframing research as learning
Many product teams initially viewed research as a way to validate decisions that had already been made. I worked with stakeholders to reframe research as a tool for reducing uncertainty and identifying risk before significant investments were made.
The question shifted from "Can we prove this design is acceptable?" to "What is the most important thing we need to learn before moving forward?"
Increasing direct customer engagement
I encouraged designers and researchers to spend more time with customers and less time relying solely on secondhand reports. Customer conversations, observations, and usability sessions became an increasingly important part of understanding both user needs and business realities.
Rather than treating customer interaction as a specialized activity, I worked to make it a core expectation of the UX function.
Connecting customer-facing functions
My background across support, consulting, training, and UX allowed me to bridge conversations that often occurred in isolation. I encouraged teams to incorporate insights from customer support cases, implementation projects, training engagements, user research, and direct customer feedback into a more complete understanding of customer needs.
This helped move conversations beyond isolated requests and toward identifying underlying patterns across the customer experience.
Building a customer participation network
Strong customer relationships already existed throughout the organization, particularly within Customer Success and account management teams. Rather than creating a separate UX recruitment process, I worked to strengthen partnerships across these functions and make customer engagement a shared responsibility.
As product teams became more engaged with customers, account managers increasingly identified users who wanted to influence the future direction of the products they depended on. This created a virtuous cycle: customers gained a voice in product development, while product teams gained faster access to participants who were motivated to provide feedback and collaborate on solutions.
Over time, customer engagement evolved from a series of isolated conversations into a growing network of relationships that benefited both customers and product teams.
Challenge | Action | Outcome |
Customer insights were fragmented across functions | Connected support, services, training, and UX perspectives | More holistic understanding of customer needs |
Research was often viewed as validation | Reframed research as risk reduction and learning | Better-informed product decisions |
Limited direct customer exposure | Increased customer engagement across UX teams | Stronger customer empathy |
Customer feedback was difficult to scale | Established repeatable and transparent research and insight-sharing practices | Broader organizational access to customer knowledge |
Product decisions were often internally driven | Embedded customer perspectives earlier in planning and discovery | Increased influence on roadmap discussions |
Results
- Expanded customer participation in discovery, usability testing, and design feedback activities across multiple product teams
- Increased customer influence on product planning, bringing customer perspectives earlier into discovery, prioritization, and roadmap discussions
- Established repeatable recruitment channels through Customer Success and account management partnerships, reducing the time required to recruit participants and accelerating access to customer feedback
- Shifted research from validation to risk reduction, enabling teams to test assumptions earlier, incorporate customer feedback before development, and make more informed product decisions
- Improved organizational visibility into customer needs by connecting insights across support, services, training, and UX, creating a more complete view of the customer experience
Customer centricity is often discussed as a value. In practice, it is a discipline. Organizations create better products when customer understanding becomes part of everyday decision-making rather than an occasional activity.
Leadership Reflection
The most effective product teams are those that continually reconnect their decisions to the people they serve. Leadership's role is not simply to advocate for customers. It is to build systems, relationships, and habits that ensure customer voices remain present in the conversations where decisions are made.
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How customer understanding translated into organizational influence.