The best operators in history refused to let distance grow between themselves and their customers.

Stay close to the customer

Bezos read customer emails himself. He forwarded complaints to executives with a single "?" and expected an answer by morning.

Not because he didn't have people for that. Because he understood something most leaders forget the moment they hit scale: the signal lives in the friction.The customer who's frustrated, confused, or about to leave — that's where the truth is.

Jobs said it differently. “You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.” Every product decision at Apple began with how it would feel to the person holding it — not what engineering could build.

Tony Hsieh built Zappos on a single idea: customer service isthe product. Not a support function. Not a cost center. The thing you're actually selling.

And yet — most companies today are doing the opposite. CS teams manage customers through dashboards. They measure health scores instead of having conversations. They send QBRs to customers who've already decided to leave. Products get built based on what the team thinks customers want, not what customers said they need.

As companies scale, CS leaders get further from customers. The tools multiply, the processes formalize, the dashboards get fancier — and the real signal disappears behind layers of abstraction.

The job of the modern CS leader is to fight that abstraction. Stay close. Build operating models that scale without losing the thing that Bezos, Jobs, and Hsieh never gave up.

That's what I do. At Junction, in coaching, and in everything I publish.