Customer Obsession in Action - Case Study from Mailchimp

Interview with Maura Kelly, VP of Engineering at Mailchimp about injecting customer obsession into software engineering. She details organizing an event to actualize customer obsession and promote it across every level of the company and shares everything she's learned along the way.

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In this interview we're covering:

• Customer obsession in software engineering
• Customer obsession event
• Origins of the customer obsession event
• Getting buy-in from leadership
• Getting buy-in from software engineers
• Feedback for the customer obsession event
• Lasting changes on the development process
• Pitfalls of customer obsession

Excerpt from the interview:

"This idea didn’t originate from one person. It came from different parts of the company. People on different teams and different levels started thinking about similar ideas, and we all came together and made it happen. It came from engineering, management, and from our support team.

I had co-conspirators who helped me plan it out and make it happen. Shout out to Mehdi, Lee, Cal, and Ariana for all the help. They were working on their own pitches about similar ideas.

We all got together and worked out the common patterns across our ideas that resulted in this event."

Click here to read the full interview!