This One Thing is the Biggest Contributor to Failure

Photo by Pablo García Saldaña on Unsplash

Do you know what’s one of the biggest contributors is to failure?
It’s the distance to the front line, the lack of contact with people using your product.

There’s one company that constantly reduces the distance to the frontline - Shopify.
Shopify requires all of its employees to work in customer support for a brief period of time. Even Shopify’s founder and CEO - Tobi Lütke - periodically works in customer support.

Tobi Lütke: “Distance to the front line becoming bigger has probably killed more companies than many other forces people might think about when talking about disruption”

I recommend motivated teams to give each team member access to the users in usability tests or customer interviews minimum every 6 weeks. You want your team to find out what the users do with the product, and what pain they try to solve with it.

Constantly focus on reducing the distance to the front line.
It’s by far the fastest way to improve the quality of your product.