Customers
What are customers?
Customers are the people who buy or use your product or service. Here's a quick rule of thumb: Your customer is whoever uses your product or is making the purchase decision.
Depending on your product context, customers can include buyers (who make purchase decisions), end-users (who use the product), prospects (potential customers you don't have yet), or internal colleagues (who use internal software). If you work on a platform team, your customers are the other teams you build services for.
How do you determine which customers to talk to?
Your outcome determines which subset of customers you should focus on interviewing. If you work on a subscription product and your team is responsible for retention, you probably want to talk with both engaged and unengaged customers who are currently subscribed. You might also want to talk with customers who recently canceled.
If you work on a B2B product, you have both customers (people involved in the purchase decision) and end-users (people who use the product). If your team works on satisfying both, then you'll need to interview both. If you're at an early-stage startup without customers yet, you need to talk to prospects.
The key to remember is you want to talk to the people who are either buying or using your product.
How do you balance the needs of buyers and users?
Most products operate in complex ecosystems where you have to meet multiple people's needs. Facebook has to meet the consumer's needs and the advertiser's needs. Netflix has to meet the viewer's needs and the content provider's needs.
In B2B environments, the person choosing to buy the product is often not the person using it. The approach is to build your product primarily for the user, but enable sales to sell. That means spending the vast majority of your time investing in what people are using, but taking a check-the-box approach for what unlocks sales.
Learn more:
- Customer Interviews: How to Recruit, What to Ask, and How to Synthesize What You Learn
- Ask Teresa: For Customer Interviews, Who Counts as a Customer?
Related terms:
- Customer Interviewing
- Continuous Discovery
- Outcome
- Product Trio
Last Updated: October 25, 2025