Customer obsession can become performative theater

User-centered performance refers to customer obsession or user-centered practice that is symbolic rather than focused on learning. It's work we do to signal to each other how customer obsessed we are, not because we want to make a different decision.

Every time a PM comes to a researcher at the end of a product process and says, 'Can you just run a quick user study just to validate our assumptions,' that's user-centered performance. It's too late to matter.

What we started doing with these complaint-storms... we'd actually start off with other products first in adjacent spaces and we'd say, 'Okay. As a group we're going to go through the customer journey from the moment you land on the website through getting your first account going... We're going to do it on one screen. Someone's going to project and then people are going to fill in every issue, everything that's confusing, every pain point.'