I recently discussed with an engineering lead on how to become more customer-centric. They mentioned there was a lightbulb moment for them when we zoomed in on different customer types.

Many people see customer-centricity as being about external customers, that is, the people who pay money for the services. But it turns out there are other types of customers as well. In our exploration, it turned out the team was doing work for four different types of customers:

1. paying customers
2. internal ops (customer care, finance, etc.)
3. other engineering teams
4. the team itself (improving efficiency, speeding up onboarding, etc.)

(Although not technically a customer, we included the team itself as well, because a lot of energy has been put into improving the team's way of working.)

We went further in the exploration:

• Who's driving value for which customer type?
• Does the team want to serve all these customer types?
• Who's responsible for measuring impact for the different customer types?

Understanding who the customer is seems to have given the lead more clarity, particularly about responsibilities, roles, and the team's focus.