Kedron Rhodes

Part 2 of this 5-part series explores a surprisingly fragile foundation in business: a shared definition of the customer. It’s easy to assume everyone’s aligned on this—after all, what company doesn’t “know their customer”? But scratch beneath the surface, and things get murky fast.

This week’s installment tells the story of one such misalignment, where two teams—both smart, both well-intentioned—operated from fundamentally different assumptions about who the customer was. One valued personal connection; the other, frictionless efficiency. Each had evidence to back them up. But when these views collided, it wasn’t just a matter of perspective—it was a strategic rupture.

What I’ve seen, time and again, is that this isn’t an edge case. It’s a common pattern. When customer definitions diverge, strategies fragment, tensions rise, and teams start talking past each other. The most dangerous part is that everyone still thinks they’re serving the customer.

So this week’s piece is a call to clarity—not just about who you serve, but who you don’t. Because until that’s clear, every decision downstream gets harder, fuzzier, and riskier.

Customer Reality ↔️

Strategic missteps often start not with bad intentions, but with fuzzy assumptions—especially about who the customer is. In this essay, I unpack how internal misalignment around “the customer” quietly derails even the most promising strategies. It’s not just a semantic issue; it’s a foundational one. When leaders, designers, and product teams hold different mental models of the customer, their efforts fragment. And when that fragmentation goes unnoticed, it can undermine everything from product-market fit to long-term positioning.
(Read More →)

🪏 Take it a bit deeper with these…

🚀 Innovation

• User-Centered Design: The Core Principles That Drive Results — Learn the 12 principles that make user-centered design more than a buzzword—and how they impact conversion, satisfaction, and trust.
• A Step-by-step Guide to Segmenting a Market — A clear, practical guide to market segmentation, ideal for students and strategy-minded professionals alike.
• Customer Data Segmentation That Drives Success — Discover how data can reveal hidden customer segments—and how those insights can inform smarter, more focused strategies.
• Putting your customers first - Mind the Product — Roxanne Rosewood breaks down the ripple effects of user-centered design on product development and team alignment.
• Impact-Centered Design: Introducing an Integrated Framework… — A deep academic dive into how design choices influence not just behavior, but perception and connection.

👋 Sign-Off

Thanks for the replies to the last newsletter—I really appreciate hearing from you. Last week was packed with evening events, so I’ve been a little slow on email replies. Thanks for your patience.

This week’s issue is all about knowing your customer, which reminds me how little I know about the subscribers of The Advantage. So if you’ve made it this far, hit reply and let me know: what’s your top challenge this week in business? I’d love to hear it. Chances are, someone else in this community is facing the same thing—and we all benefit from exploring those problem spaces together.

Until next time, keep seeking clarity.

⁓ Kedron

P.S. I knocked out some Father’s Day chores this weekend—nothing says celebration like house project and “work orders”—and jammed to a Spotify playlist it lovingly curated just for me. I’ve been flirting with the idea of switching to Apple Music because, let’s be honest, Spotify’s UI is starting to feel like a treasure map drawn by a toddler. But after years together, it knows me too well. Like an old friend who’s kind of a mess, but still makes the best mixtapes.