Why CEOs Really Do Need To Be Customer Zero

Forbes

a day ago

Dennis Kozak is the Chief Executive Officer at Ivanti, responsible for the company's overall strategic direction and growth.
A colleague once brilliantly suggested staying in your own guestroom for a night to see what your guests really experience. After all, a nice mattress gets overshadowed quickly if car headlights keep waking you up—and you wouldn't know that if you didn't sleep there. Being Customer Zero is the equivalent of sleeping in your guest room every night.
My first week as CEO, I didn't need to get briefed on our products because I lived in them. I insisted our IT team set me up with the same experience our customers have—not a special executive version, not a sanitized demo, but the real thing. That decision revealed more about our business than a hundred PowerPoint presentations ever could. But too many tech leaders remain disconnected from the day-to-day reality of using their own solutions. They see polished demos and curated metrics but miss the friction points that frustrate actual users.
CEOs as Customer Zero is not a marketing stunt. It's not a charming talking point. It's a necessity for effective leadership and operations.
Establishing A Real Ownership Mentality
Throughout my career, I've distinguished between what I call owner mentality versus renter mentality. Renters make decisions based on short-term convenience. Owners invest in understanding every aspect of their property because they're committed to its long-term value.
Customer Zero cultivates this ownership mentality throughout the organization. When your marketing team struggles with the same UX issues your customers face, those "minor bugs" suddenly become urgent priorities. When your sales team relies on your security solutions to protect sensitive deals, product promises transform into personal commitments.
What Being Customer Zero Looks Like In Practice
At my company, we put this approach to the test during extraordinary circumstances. When we rapidly grew to 3,200 employees through several strategic acquisitions, we faced exactly the kind of challenges our customers deal with: We remotely managed and provisioned around 3,000 devices globally while deprovisioning approximately 2,000 devices—all during peak pandemic disruption.
Our team generated over 22,000 tickets on our platform, with automatic resolution and self-help functionality reclaiming substantial bandwidth for our IT support team. We implemented our own DevSecOps processes, scanning our code for vulnerabilities and prioritizing critical security issues—the same workflow we recommend to customers.
The results weren't always comfortable, but they were invaluable. Our teams delivered unfiltered, candid feedback about functionality and user experience. We made changes accordingly, often discovering issues no focus group would have uncovered.
How Being Customer Zero Drives Transformation
Being Customer Zero drives three critical transformations:
Like many of our customers, our company has on-premises products moving to the cloud. By experiencing this migration firsthand, we get immediate feedback on gaps between these environments.
When you acquire different solutions with varying technology stacks, integration becomes critical. Our Customer Zero program evaluates these integrations through day-to-day use, testing both single-pane-of-glass management and API functionality.
Nothing builds credibility like saying, "We rely on this so heavily that our business would collapse without it." Customer Zero creates authentic conviction in both sales teams and customers.
How To Become Customer Zero For Your Own Company
If you're considering implementing your own Customer Zero initiative, start with these practical approaches:
• Champion universal adoption at the executive level.
• Create formal feedback channels between internal users and development.
• Measure and track internal usage metrics as seriously as customer metrics.
• Document both successes and pain points for transparent customer conversations.
• Prioritize internal user experience issues in your development backlogs.
The most crucial element? Commitment to authenticity. If your team discovers limitations, fix them before expecting customers to adapt around them.
Checking Your Ego At The Door
Let's be honest: Becoming Customer Zero can be humbling. Maybe really humbling. You'll discover rough edges in your products. You'll experience frustrations your customers have silently endured. You might even question past decisions about product priorities. That discomfort is exactly the point. It forces your organization to confront reality rather than marketing aspirations. To make it work, you have to check your ego at the door.
This approach has transformed how we innovate. Our teams now operate at the leading edge—managing complex IT data while leveraging AI and automation capabilities because our own business depends on them working flawlessly.
Every executive should regularly ask: Would I bet my business on my own product today? If the answer makes you hem and haw even a little bit, you've identified your most pressing priority.
The greatest gift you can give customers isn't another feature—it's the confidence that comes from knowing you trust your solutions enough to build your own success upon them.
Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?