Users Not Customers

What it’s about

Aaron Shapiro, who ran the digital agency Huge, argues that the digital era flipped the old business model. Companies used to focus on customers, the people who pay. Now the people who use the product (who may never pay directly) decide whether it succeeds, because every digital touchpoint shapes the brand and the business.

What I learned

Design for users and the business follows. Optimise for the person actually using the product, and revenue tends to come with it. Optimise for the buyer at the user’s expense and you lose both, slowly.

Every touchpoint is the brand. In a digital product there’s no separation between the experience and the company. A slow page or a confusing flow is what people think of you.

Users and customers are often different people. The person who signs the contract and the person who lives with the software every day want different things. You have to serve both, but the user decides whether it sticks.

What I applied

The place I apply this most is internal platforms, where the gap between user and customer is stark. The budget holder is the customer; the developer is the user. A platform designed to satisfy the budget holder’s checklist but painful to use day to day will be routed around.

At Sky, Playwright spread across departments through a UI guild and working examples rather than by mandate (A Testing Strategy Teams Actually Adopted, Chairing a Cross-Team UI Guild). Engineers adopted it because it made their lives easier, which is exactly the user-first argument.

On the graph library, Storybook stories doubled as documentation and a live demo, so the people who’d actually use the components could see and try them before committing (Building a Graph Component Library).

And it’s the rule I apply to Golden Paths: optional but attractive. If teams have to be ordered onto the path, it isn’t good enough for its users yet.

Where it connects

Internal Developer Platform · Golden Paths · Golden Paths and the Recommended Routine · The Business Value of Developer Relations · Building Digital Culture