Problem, solved.

At UXDX 2019 in Dublin, in front of 1500+ attendees, I explained how successful products deliver on both the customer and the business needs, but aligning the two can be challenging. How can teams map their activities back to the business and customer KPIs?

Watch the full keynote video on YouTube

The Background

In my keynote, I shared insights from my career across various organizations, such as Intel, Kodak, Orange, and Fujitsu, leading up to my current role at LEGO. Across these companies, I witnessed firsthand how misalignment between business goals and user needs can lead to disastrous outcomes. For example, at Intel, a project internally dubbed “Never Going Into Production” cost $40 million and ultimately failed. Similarly, at Orange, a seemingly trivial decision -choosing the wrong color for a set-top box light – led to millions of customer support calls. These experiences highlighted the critical need for aligning both business and customer goals.

However, it wasn’t until LEGO faced its own near-collapse in 2003 that the company truly understood the devastating impact of this misalignment. LEGO realized that while it was innovating in many ways, there was a disconnect between what customers wanted and the company’s business priorities. This led to a major shift at LEGO, where aligning customer satisfaction with business outcomes became a driving force in the company’s transformation.

At LEGO, we adopted a clear and consistent vision across product teams, a vision that transcended silos and ensured that every department understood both customer needs and business goals. This alignment strategy helped us not only recover but rebuild LEGO into the global brand we see today.

The Problem

Aligning business goals with user needs is one of the biggest challenges in scaling any organization. Business goals are often centered on profitability, growth, and market share, while customer needs focus on usability, satisfaction, and emotional engagement. Without proper alignment, these two elements can pull a company in different directions, leading to products that don’t meet customer expectations or business goals.

LEGO, despite its strong brand, had once suffered from this disconnect, as it did not effectively prioritize customer-centered innovation. In the early 2000s, LEGO found itself losing market share and struggling to remain relevant. This misalignment between business strategy and customer desires ultimately led to the company’s financial crisis. While LEGO was innovating, it wasn’t necessarily innovating in ways that connected deeply with its customers’ emotional needs, making it harder to build lasting, meaningful relationships with its audience.

Additionally, companies often face internal barriers to alignment. Teams across different departments work in silos, which leads to a lack of shared understanding of both customer insights and business objectives. Without a clear and unified vision, it becomes easy to make decisions that prioritize one over the other, risking the success of the overall product.

The Solution

At LEGO, we recognized that aligning business objectives with customer needs would be the foundation of our future success. To achieve this, we embraced an agile approach where the Chief Information Officer (CIO) played a pivotal role in ensuring that both business and customer needs were at the heart of product strategy. This meant fostering an environment of transparency, collaboration, and open communication between departments.

One of the most powerful tools we implemented was Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). OKRs became a framework that guided every team at LEGO to not only focus on outcomes but also ensure that these outcomes directly tied back to both business growth and customer satisfaction. With OKRs, we could align our goals and measure progress toward both improving user experience and delivering on key business metrics.

Our focus on agile methodologies also helped us build a continuous delivery pipeline, ensuring that product updates were delivered efficiently and iteratively. This allowed us to respond quickly to customer feedback, enabling rapid adjustments and improvements. Agile practices helped break down silos and create a culture of collaboration across diverse teams. This increased our ability to pivot quickly, maintain focus on our goals, and make sure we were always in tune with customer needs.

Furthermore, we emphasized the importance of a diverse team. The diverse perspectives within our teams helped us design products that were not only functional but also emotionally engaging for a wide range of customers. We encouraged our teams to be brave, embrace curiosity, and remain focused on delivering real value. This led to the development of innovative products, such as LEGO Ideas, which allowed customers to submit their own ideas for sets—fostering a deeper connection between LEGO and its fans.

The Benefits

By embedding alignment into our product development process, LEGO has seen remarkable results. Aligning business goals with customer needs has not only helped us recover from past challenges but also positioned us for long-term success. Since 2003, we’ve rebuilt LEGO’s market share, expanded globally, and continuously innovated to meet the changing needs of our customers.

This customer-centric approach has been crucial in driving business outcomes. By creating products that resonate deeply with users, we’ve fostered brand loyalty and trust. Our LEGO Ideas platform, for example, has helped us tap into the creative potential of our customers, allowing them to contribute to the product development process. This has strengthened the bond between LEGO and its users while also leading to new revenue streams.

Moreover, the use of OKRs has allowed us to maintain focus on both customer satisfaction and business growth, ensuring that every product release is a step forward in both domains. Through regular check-ins and transparency, teams remain aligned on objectives and are empowered to make decisions that benefit both customers and the business. The result has been a significant reduction in wasted resources and a higher return on investment for our projects.

Ultimately, LEGO’s commitment to aligning customer and business needs has resulted in a more resilient, innovative, and customer-focused company. As we continue to expand and innovate, we know that maintaining this alignment is the key to our continued success.

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