This week, Adam has a crank theory. But it's based in experience!

As we progress in our careers, we go from "unwritten but self-imposed" rules ("I did XYZ so I deserve a promotion") to "written rules" ("The written career matrix says I need to do XYZ at this level") back to "unwritten but reality-tested" rules. This third phase becomes more important as you get into more senior, leadership, and unique roles... like, for example, a lot of roles in Scaled CX.

Dee and Adam talk through some unwritten rules we've learned in our careers. Things like:

• What it means to make work lighter for other people
• Why emotional regulation is so important in crucial career conversations
• Who you need on your side in a promotion panel
• How to navigate the feedback vs. the "feedback behind the feedback"
• How to balance craft skills with organizational savvy
• Why promotions don't always go through the first time
• How to avoid letting ratings and promotions affect your identity

Hopefully you find this helpful in annual performance season!

Do you even customer, bro?

A lot of us in CX feel like we end up being the champions of the customer in our orgs, or even the heroes. But that's not a good thing, right? We shouldn't be relying on heroics to make sure that customers have a good experience with us.

The better we are at retaining customers, the better it is for our bottom line (and even our top line, if they expand with us). That's why businesses are obsessed with Net Revenue Retention, Gross Revenue Retention, and churn rates.

So you'd think we'd be better at understanding what actually makes our customers tick, right? But a lot of businesses have a hard time making the leap from looking at NRR, GRR, and churn rates on a spreadsheet to actually understanding what customers are trying to do with our products, what they get value from, how they prefer to interact with us, and what frustrates them.

The antidote to this is to build a truly customer-centric organization. The "bad" news is that it's hard to cultivate that without total leadership buy-in and having customer focus in your DNA. But it's not impossible.

In this episode, we're walking through the signs that show whether a company is customer-centric. You could audit your current company to see how it stacks up, or use this to evaluate a company you're considering joining.

To make this harder, companies often do things that SOUND customer centric but actually aren't, so we're diving into some of those false signals too.

Look for things like:

• Are the company's OKRs and goals customer-centric? How much do they reflect whether you're building for and serving the customer adequately, vs. focusing purely on topline revenue?
• What programs does the company have to capture and represent the voice of the customer in product development? Are they being given lip-service or are you actually developing things that customers find useful?
• Does your release process take customers into account, or are you shipping in a way that doesn't prepare them for success?
• Do end users actually like using your product, or do you mainly develop features that the economic buyer wants, and end users hate?
• How do prioritization decisions get made? Are execs citing actual customer data, or customer names? Or are you hearing more about what [insert name of senior stakeholder] wants?
• Where do teams like Scaled, Digital, Community, and Customer Education sit? In Marketing or in a Customer org?

We get into these, and more, in the episode. But let us know what you think: what are the signs that you think differentiate a truly customer-centric org from one that's not, or just giving it lip service? Or tell us from the POV of businesses where you're the customer! What is your experience like working with orgs who are truly customer-centric vs ones who only claim to be?

No, really, what's up with it? Is it a good thing that our jobs create so much of our purpose in life, our communities, and our sense of worth? Is work becoming a RELIGION? In this episode, you can skip out on Berghain because we've got tickets to the hottest club in town: the CXetera book club. And in this edition, we're sharing our takeaways from the short-but-profound "On Work" by Derek Thompson. He takes a sociological look at why work has come to be such an important part of our identities (at least in America), and how recent factors like automation, AI, and remote work are all shifting our relationship to work. And we use the opportunity to talk about our own relationship to work and our careers. As two people who have been lucky enough to find success in our careers, we've seen that to succeed, we need to work hard. To work hard, we need to find meaning. And to find meaning, we need to bring a lot of our identities into the job. And that's worth unpacking. If you're like us, and you're wondering if you have the right relationship to work or whether you should take a different tack, this might be the episode AND the book for you.