Bringing the Customer into the Room: How Teams Can Build Solutions That Truly Stick

What is it about?

When teams develop innovative products or services, success hinges not just on what they create, but whether customers actually adopt and use it. This study offers a detailed look at how putting the customer’s perspective at the heart of team collaboration leads to better outcomes. The study focuses on a concept called customer-oriented boundary spanning: appointing a team member to act as a bridge between the team and the customer. This role involves actively engaging with customers, gathering insights, and making sure their needs are front and center during team discussions. In other words, it’s about ensuring the customer has a seat at the table, even if they’re not in the room. Through a large-scale field experiment in a global IT company, the researchers found strong evidence that this approach leads to significantly higher customer adoption of the solutions teams develop.

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Photo by Headway on Unsplash

Photo by Headway on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Customer-oriented boundary spanning helps teams align around shared objectives, enhancing the outcomes of information elaboration (exchange of team members’ perspectives), and ensures effective utilization of functional background diversity (variety of expertise in the team). Eventually, this promotes customer adoption. In cross-functional settings, where teams include members from different backgrounds like sales, technology, and operations, it is easy for communication to get siloed. Boundary spanners help break down those silos. Rather than focusing too much on blue-sky brainstorming, this role grounds teams in what’s feasible, aligned, and valuable for the customer. It helps avoid being “too creative” without a plan, by pushing the team to prioritize, coordinate, and stay aligned on delivering meaningful impact.

Perspectives