Customer Obsession and AI Operations

One of the nuances of customer obsession is understanding the diversity of your customer base. To start with, in technology it’s easy to forget that your customers can be distributed around the world and have different needs accordingly, but when you are building complex systems you must understand the different layers of customers relying on your work.

This complicated customer obsession. With a service oriented architecture, ownership of functionality is so well decentralised that (a) some teams are specialised and abstracted away to the point that they may lose sight of the end customer, and (b) when you are running a small but critical part of a large business, you must understand your customer base now includes every team building products using your service, and every customer using those products.

An example of this problem from my experience is working in the Amazon Video Commerce Platform. Globally we handled 10–100K requests every second from devices ranging from the Wii U to Alexa, owned by customers from Argentina to Zimbabwe. Lots of demands were placed on us, and understanding our customers at every level was key: from us, Amazon Video users needed reliable payments and playback with low latency. Device teams calling into us (e.g. Alexa) wanted high availability, helpful responses to operational issues, and responsiveness to feature requests.

If you run some type of knowledge service in data science or AI, customer obsession involves both understanding the needs of those who are packaging up and distributing your specialised skill set as well as ensuring your service solves the end-user problem. Whether you are optimising project management, classifying food by dietary requirements, or simulating consumer market behaviour, if you want your service to fulfil its potential, improving your technical operations will allow you to scale like Amazon did.

If you are building an AI service, or are at a data science consultancy and would like to chat about this, find me at alex@treebeard.io.

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