Today as I look out my office windows I realize that what I can see is limited by the size, shape, and location of my walls and windows. A business manager’s view of her customers is similarly limited by her business’s metaphorical walls and windows. This makes it hard for any of us to write unbiased surveys for our own customers. Our perspective as an “insider” is too limited. We need someone outside the walls, like Hart.

For a business manager, the view of customers and their needs is shaped by who works there, their assumptions and biases, the categories of products sold, and other factors.

A good example is the way art supply stores are organized, which is by type of product (paints, brushes, paper, etc.). This makes sense to the retailer, because that is how they order things from suppliers. This is not how customers figure out what to buy. If I want to draw with pastels, I’d like to have the pastels, pastel paper, erasers, fixative, and other pastel-related items all in one spot. Instead I have to go to at least four different areas of a store. The retailers’ product category driven perspective encourages them to think artists think that way, too, and limits an art supply store manager’s ability to think about customers in terms of what they make, which is often mixed media and 3-D artworks, two “categories” art supply stores don’t use on the sales floor.

One way to look beyond your limited perspective is to think explicitly about how you view your business world. Here is an example. In the middle put common areas, on the left how your business views things, on the right put how your customers view things.

Business view	Common areas	Customer view
Product categories as set up on sales floor	Stuff	What they want to make, such as a painting, knit scarf, or paper mache dog
Staff by department: sales, marketing, accounting, etc.	People	People who help me in store, people at checkout, phone person
The distributor, manufacturer, holding company, importer	Makers of the stuff	The brand on the package