Building a Customer-Centric Culture in B2B
In today’s B2B landscape, embedding a truly customer-centric culture across large organisations has become both more crucial and more complex. In a recent episode of B2B Marketing Futures, hosted by Joaquin Dominguez, three leading product marketers explored how their companies are operationalising customer-first thinking, aligning global teams, and overcoming the challenges of truly understanding their end-users.
Host
Joaquin Dominguez , Head of Marketing at Adzact
Guests
Karthic Subramanian, Staff Product Marketing Manager at Confluent
Shira Marcks, Lead Product Marketer at Motive
Kaushik Patange, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Atlassian
What Customer Centricity Looks Like in Practice
The discussion opened with a shared recognition that customer-centricity must be more than a slogan — it has to shape daily practices across teams. Kaushik described how Atlassian embodies this value through its well-known principle of being "customer zero", testing and using every product internally before it is released externally. He emphasised that by first acting as their own customer, Atlassian employees build deep empathy for user needs from the outset.
In contrast, Shira highlighted a different challenge at Motive, whose customer base includes truck drivers, construction workers, and others working in the physical economy — groups vastly different from the company’s Silicon Valley-based teams. She explained that because they cannot be customer zero, Motive invests heavily in customer education initiatives internally, helping teams build genuine empathy for audiences with fundamentally different worldviews and day-to-day realities.
Karthic noted that even in technically-oriented companies like Confluent and his previous experience at MongoDB, the challenge remains in ensuring that teams do not conflate their own technical expertise with actual customer priorities. While engineers and product teams may intuitively understand their products, formal systems are needed to check assumptions against real-world customer feedback.
"We are customer number zero. Every product we take to market, we use internally first — it is about truly living the customer experience, not just imagining it." — Kaushik Patange
Operationalising Empathy at Scale
While all three panellists agreed that building empathy is essential, they also recognised the dangers of internal biases. Karthic raised the point that when companies use their own products internally, they risk assuming their experience mirrors that of all users. Without external validation, organisations may overemphasise features or narratives that do not resonate with broader audiences.
Shira shared an experience from her time at GitHub, where internal assumptions about what customers valued were deeply entrenched. Through extensive surveying, they discovered that the features they believed were driving decisions were not nearly as influential as assumed. She noted that the process of challenging internal beliefs must be methodical, data-driven, and approached with humility, allowing people to engage critically with new insights rather than dismiss them.
Kaushik highlighted how Atlassian balances internal expertise with customer validation through advisory boards, user surveys, and storytelling. He explained that showcasing human outcomes — improvements to day-to-day work and team collaboration, not just business metrics — is a powerful way to reinforce customer-centric thinking both internally and externally.
"We can never be customer zero — so we spend a lot of time building empathy by truly stepping into our customers’ world before even mentioning our product." — Shira Marcks
Marketing Infrastructure in Complex B2B Contexts
A recurring theme was the unique challenge of marketing highly technical or infrastructure products. Karthic reflected on the difficulty of making abstract benefits like database performance feel tangible and meaningful. He explained that framing technical solutions in terms of time savings, cost efficiencies, and the ability to unlock new capabilities for businesses helps bridge the gap between technical excellence and customer outcomes.
Shira noted that especially when serving non-technical audiences, it is crucial to step back from industry assumptions and frame communications in ways that match the customers’ context, language, and emotional drivers — even when those differ starkly from the marketer’s own experiences.
"When you're close to the product, you risk believing you know what the customer wants — but true customer centricity demands you constantly validate that belief." — Karthic Subramanian
Final Reflections: Start Small, Stay Human
As the session closed, each panellist offered advice for B2B marketers seeking to embed greater customer-centricity within their organisations.
Kaushik emphasised the importance of nurturing internal champions who can advocate for the customer and integrate feedback loops systematically into day-to-day processes. He encouraged the use of consistent cadences for sharing customer insights, ensuring they remain visible and actionable across teams.
Shira encouraged marketers not to be overwhelmed by the idea of “changing the culture”, but instead to start with small, concrete changes — adjusting language, visuals, and framing to better align with customer realities. Small, thoughtful shifts can create a cumulative impact over time.
Karthic advised starting small but structured. Even basic tools like a shared document for customer insights, or a single NPS survey, can create the foundation for scaling customer-centric practices as the organisation grows.
Conclusion
The conversation underlined that customer-centricity in B2B is not simply about collecting feedback or adjusting messaging. It requires a deeper cultural commitment to genuinely understanding and valuing the customer’s world, even — and especially — when that world is different from one’s own. By embedding empathy, fostering internal champions, and maintaining rigorous systems for capturing and acting on insights, B2B organisations can transform customer-centricity from a buzzword into a sustainable competitive advantage.
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