Why Your Role Doesn't Exempt You from Working for Customers

Let me tell you something that'll make every "Senior Staff Principal Architect" clutch their pearls: your primary job at a startup isn't writing elegant code. It's not designing scalable systems. It's not even shipping features.

Your primary job is customer success.

"But I'm a backend engineer!" you cry. "I don't talk to customers!"

Yeah, that's exactly the problem.

The Great Startup Delusion

You know what a startup CTO's primary job is? Customer success.

The CEO? Definitely customer success.

That hotshot engineer you just hired from FAANG? Customer success.

The intern who started last week? You guessed it - customer success.

If you're pre-Series B, or your engineers can still name every customer - there should not be a product management layer between your engineering team and your customers. Period. Full stop. End of discussion.

Here's what happens when you add a PM layer too early:

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The Telephone Game: Customer says they need X. PM interprets it as Y. Engineer builds Z. Nobody's happy.
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The Shield Excuse: Engineers hide behind PMs. "I just build what I'm told." Congratulations, you've created a feature factory where nobody owns the outcomes.
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The Bureaucracy Begins: Now you need product specs. And roadmaps. And sprint planning. And backlog grooming. And stakeholder alignment meetings. Meanwhile, your competitor just shipped because their engineer talked directly to the customer and fixed the problem in 20 minutes.
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The Ownership Vacuum: When something goes wrong, engineers blame PMs for bad requirements. PMs blame engineers for poor implementation. Customers blame your entire company for not solving their problems.

Save the PM layer for when you're actually scaling. Until then, let your builders talk to your users.

The 2025 Reality Check

It's 2025, and the formula is figured out. Want to be a profitable company? Put your customers first.

This isn't feel-good advice from a business book. This is market reality. The companies that survive and thrive are the ones where everyone - EVERYONE - is focused on customer outcomes.

The people who use your product day in and day out? They'll become your best salespeople, and they'll do it for free. But only if you genuinely care about their success.

When your customers love you - really love you - magical things happen:

•They tell their colleagues about you at conferences
•They defend you in Reddit threads
•They write blog posts about how you saved their ass
•They tweet about your new features
•They answer support questions in your Slack community
•They become your advisory board, product team, and QA department rolled into one

You literally cannot buy this kind of advocacy. But you can earn it by giving a damn.

The 10% Rule of Value Capture

As a general rule, companies can only capture about 10% of the value they create for customers, unless they're a monopoly or something.

More value for customers directly impacts how much you can charge. Create 10x the value? You can charge 10x the price and still only be capturing that same 10%.

But try to capture 20% or 30% of the value you create? Watch how fast your customers start shopping around. Watch how fast some YC startup decides your margins look tasty.

The only sustainable business model is to create massive value, then take your modest 10% cut. And the only way to create that much value? Focus relentlessly on your customers' success.

The Process That Actually Works

Step 1: Kill the Abstraction Layers

Every layer between your team and your customers is a layer of lies. Here's what your "process" should look like:

•Customer has problem
•Customer tells someone on your team (anyone!)
•That person either fixes it or loops in someone who can
•Problem solved
•Customer happy
•Repeat

That's it. That's the whole process.

Step 2: Everyone Talks to Customers

"But I'm an introvert!" "But I'm not good with people!" "But that's not my job!"

Shut up. This is your job now.

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Engineers: You should be in customer calls understanding their workflows, their challenges, their actual problems. Not the sanitized version that comes through three layers of telephone.
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Designers: Stop designing in Figma isolation. Watch real users struggle with your interface. Experience their frustration firsthand. Then fix it.
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Backend folks: Yes, you too. That API you're building? Talk to the developers who'll use it. That database schema? Understand the business logic it needs to support.
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The CEO: If you're not talking to customers weekly, you're not doing your job. Period.

Stripe: The Collison brothers personally onboarded their first customers, often implementing features on the spot during calls. They'd share their screen, code live, and deploy fixes while the customer watched.

Airbnb: The founders literally lived with their early hosts to understand their needs. Not video calls. Not surveys. They slept in their spare bedrooms and ate breakfast at their tables.

Superhuman: Rahul Vohra personally onboarded every customer for the first two years. The CEO. Of a venture-backed startup. Doing customer onboarding. Every. Single. Day.

Segment: The founders spent a year building the wrong product because they didn't talk to customers. When they finally did, they rebuilt everything in a week and found product-market fit.

Step 3: Build the Feedback Loop from Hell

Your feedback loop should be so tight it makes a Formula 1 pit stop look leisurely.

Customer reports bug → Engineer fixes bug → Customer gets fix.

Same day. Same hour if possible.

"But what about code review?" "What about testing?" "What about process?"

Look, I'm not saying ship broken shit. I'm saying your default mode should be urgency. Your default assumption should be that every customer problem is YOUR problem, and it needs solving NOW.

Step 4: Make Customer Success Metrics Your North Star

Not revenue. Not user count. Not MAU/DAU ratios.

Customer success. Measured by:

•How quickly you respond to issues
•How often customers achieve their goals with your product
•How many customers actively recommend you
•How many customers would be genuinely upset if you disappeared tomorrow

💡

Forget your vanity metrics. Here's what you should actually track:

Time to First Response: How long does it take for a customer to hear back from a real human? If it's more than an hour during business hours, you're failing.

Time to Resolution: How long from problem reported to problem solved? Days = death. Hours = acceptable. Minutes = winning.

Customer Effort Score: How hard do customers have to work to get value from your product? Every click, every configuration, every workaround is a failure.

Unprompted Advocacy: How many customers recommend you without being asked? This is the only growth metric that matters.

The Brutal Truth About Your Competition

While you're building your elaborate org structure and hiding your engineers behind layers of process, your competition is doing this:

•Their CTO is on customer calls
•Their engineers are shipping fixes in real-time
•Their entire team knows their top 10 customers by name
•They're building exactly what their customers need, not what some PM thinks they might want

And they're eating your lunch.

The Excuses I'm Tired of Hearing

"But this doesn't scale!"

You're right. It doesn't scale. You know what else doesn't scale? Being dead.

You'll have plenty of time to build scalable processes when you have actual scale. Until then, do things that don't scale. Talk to every customer. Fix every problem. Obsess over every detail.

"But engineers aren't good at customer interaction!"

Bullshit. Engineers are problem solvers. Customers have problems. It's a match made in heaven.

The only reason engineers are "bad" at customer interaction is because we've trained them to hide in their caves and only communicate through Jira tickets. Break the conditioning.

"But we need to focus on the product roadmap!"

Your customers ARE your product roadmap. Their problems ARE your features. Their workflows ARE your user stories.

Every hour spent in abstract roadmap planning is an hour not spent solving real problems for real people who will really pay you real money.

"But what about our vision?"

Your vision is worthless if nobody wants it. Steve Jobs didn't ignore customers - he understood them better than they understood themselves. But he did that by obsessing over their lives, not by sitting in an ivory tower dreaming up features.

The 6 Policies You Implement Today (And Never Look Back)

Policy 1: Speed Is Everything

Fuck 24 hours. Nothing makes customers happier than their feedback being responded to in real time. The biggest advantage a small company has over a big company? Speed. While BigCorp puts them in a queue for 3 days, you respond in 30 minutes and ship fixes in hours.

The speed hierarchy:

•Customer can't do their job → Fix in hours
•Customer is annoyed → Fix in days
•Customer wants improvement → Fix in weeks
•Your architectural preferences → Never

What "good enough" looks like:

•It solves the customer's immediate problem
•It doesn't break other shit
•It doesn't create security holes
•It can be improved later

That's it. That's the bar.

Plenty of companies will switch to you just because their complaints get acknowledged by senior people with the knowledge and ability to actually fix shit. Right now. Not next sprint. Not after the architecture review. NOW.

Real examples of speed winning:

•Stripe's early CSV export was literally string concatenation. Worked fine.
•Airbnb's payment system was manual for months. Hosts got paid, and it was reliable.
•Amazon's recommendation engine started as a hardcoded list. People bought stuff.

What kills speed:

•"But what if we need to scale this to 1M users?" (You have 12)
•"The code isn't clean enough" (The customer doesn't care)
•"We should use microservices" (You should be in jail)
•"Let's do it right the first time" (You won't)

Your perfect solution shipped next month is worthless compared to your hacky solution shipped today. Ship fast. Iterate later. Or die with perfect code.

Policy 2: Direct Connection

Remove every layer between builders and users. No PMs translating. No support filtering. Every engineer joins at least one customer call per month. Every customer call has an engineer. No exceptions.

Create a #customer-feedback channel. Everyone reads it. Every day. Make it the most important channel in your Slack.

What actually goes in the channel:

•Direct quotes from customer emails
•Support ticket escalations with context
•Feature requests with the actual use case
•Complaints - especially the harsh ones
•Competition mentions ("We're switching to X because...")

The rules:

•No filtering. The brutal feedback stays brutal.
•Engineers respond directly. No vague "we'll look into it" responses.
•Celebrate fixes publicly. "@john fixed Sarah's CSV export issue in 37 minutes 🎉"

No more sales calls where promises are made without knowing if they're technically possible. No more support calls where the answer is "I'll have to ask engineering." Have someone who can actually fix the problem on the call.

Layers that need to die:

•Support ticket systems that engineers never see
•PM "prioritization" meetings that take weeks
•"Voice of customer" reports that sanitize the anger
•Any process that shields engineers from real user problems

The entire company needs to experience customer frustrations directly. Not just hear about them secondhand. When everyone understands that dental offices are drowning in onboarding paperwork, that's when the designer starts thinking about workflow at 2 AM. That's when the engineer refactors the slow query without being asked.

Your engineers are adults. They can handle knowing their code makes people's lives harder. In fact, they NEED to know. Stop hiding. Start connecting. Let the pain flow through your organization.

Policy 3: Outcomes Over Features

No feature gets built without a customer asking for it. Fuck your vision. Fuck your innovation. Solve real problems first.

You know what customers have never asked for?

•Your AI-powered dashboard that nobody uses
•That slick animation that breaks on mobile
•The "revolutionary" workflow that requires a PhD to understand
•Your blockchain integration (it's 2025, give it up)

You know what customers actually ask for?

•"Can you just make it remember my last search?"
•"Can the export actually work?"
•"Can I undo that thing I just did?"
•"Can it not log me out every 5 minutes?"

The litmus test: If you can't link a feature to a specific customer request, it doesn't get built. Period.

Start measuring customer success, not feature delivery. How many customers achieved their goal this week? That's your new velocity.

What customer success actually looks like:

•The dentist who finally automated their appointment reminders
•The accountant who cut their invoice time in half
•The teacher who can actually find last year's lesson plans

How to measure this:

•Define what success means for each customer segment
•Track it religiously (yes, this means talking to them)
•Report on it weekly: "7 customers achieved their primary goal"
•Celebrate it more than you celebrate shipping

The mindset shift: You're not shipping features. You're shipping outcomes. Your new standup question isn't "What did you ship?" It's "Whose life did you improve?"

If you can't answer that, you wasted your week.

Policy 4: Executive Accessibility

Every customer gets a direct way to reach your team. Not support@. Not a contact form.

You're a startup? Customers should have the CEO's personal phone number. Not kidding. Your competitors are hiding behind support@. You're texting customers back at 10 PM. Guess who wins?

Policy 5: Live Their Reality

Everyone on your team uses your product for real work. Building software for dental offices but you're not a dentist? Then you better be:

•Shadowing real users weekly - Watch them click every button, struggle with every workflow
•Recording everything - Screen recordings of actual usage. Notice where they hesitate, where they give up
•Living in their world - Spend a day at a dental office. Understand their chaos, their actual problems
•Finding the invisible pain - The stuff they don't even know to ask for

If you can't use your own product, you better become the world's foremost expert on how your customers use it. No exceptions.

Policy 6: Single Owner

When a customer reports a problem, someone owns it until it's solved. Not "the team." Not "support." A specific human with a name.

What ownership means:

•Your name is on it
•You have the authority to fix it
•You communicate directly with the customer
•You don't sleep well until it's resolved

How it works: "Sarah from Acme Corp can't export her data" → John owns it

•John reproduces the issue
•John fixes it or pulls in whoever can
•John tells Sarah it's fixed
•John follows up to make sure it actually worked

The handoff protocol:

•Going on vacation? Your issues get explicitly reassigned
•Overwhelmed? You ask for help BEFORE dropping balls

No more "it fell through the cracks." Someone always takes care of it. Always.

These aren't suggestions. These aren't "when we have time" initiatives. These are the non-negotiables that separate companies that survive from companies that don't.

Implement them today. All of them. Right now.

"But our current process—" Fuck your current process. "But our team structure—" Restructure it. "But change is hard—" Failure is harder.

Your choice.

💡

You know what all successful startups have in common? In the early days, they were all customer success companies in disguise.

Zappos: Tony Hsieh would personally take customer service calls during the holidays. The CEO. Of a billion-dollar company. Answering phones.

Amazon: Jeff Bezos had an empty chair in every meeting representing the customer. Cheesy? Maybe. Effective? Look at their market cap.

Warby Parker: The founders personally delivered glasses to customers' homes in the early days. Not to be cute. To understand how glasses fit into their customers' lives.

Discord: Started as a gaming company, pivoted to chat when they noticed gamers using their voice chat more than their game. They listened to users, not their original vision.

The pattern is clear: obsess over customers, and everything else follows.

The Bottom Line

Here's what separates the startups that make it from the ones that don't:

The ones that make it understand a fundamental truth - your customers' success IS your success. Not the other way around.

Every person in your startup, from the CEO to the newest intern, needs to wake up thinking about customer problems and go to bed dreaming about customer solutions.

You don't need a customer success team when everyone is customer success.

You don't need a complicated org chart when everyone knows their job is to make customers happy.

You don't need elaborate processes when everyone is empowered to solve problems.

The Call to Action

Stop reading Medium articles about growth hacking. Stop optimizing your funnel. Stop A/B testing button colors.

Go talk to a customer. Right now. Today.

Ask them:

•What sucks about their day?
•What would make their life easier?
•Why did they choose you?
•What would make them leave?
•What would make them tell their friends about you?

Then stop talking and listen. Really listen. Not waiting-for-your-turn-to-talk listen. Active, engaged listening.

And then - here's the radical part - actually do something about what you heard.

Because in 2025, with massive competitors who have more features, more funding, and more engineers, the one thing you can offer that they can't is actually giving a shit.

Your customers can smell indifference from a mile away. They can also smell genuine care. Which one do you think builds billion-dollar companies?

Everyone is customer success. Especially you.

Now stop reading this and go make a customer happy.

Everyone is Customer Success