When the market was wrong and the customer was right

A lesson in customer obsession, learned the hard way

There’s a particular kind of failure that masquerades as success, and another kind of success that begins life dressed as failure. I was lucky enough to experience both, at the same time.

At the time, I was working at O2. We were contemplating a bold move into broadband - full infrastructure, not just piggybacking. On paper, it looked ambitious. But when I ran the numbers, the picture soured. This was a scale-driven market: you needed to be big or be gone. We were late, and the remaining “net adds” - industry jargon for new customers - simply weren’t enough to feed a subscale challenger like us.

Worse, the much-vaunted “synergies” between mobile and broadband didn’t pass the sniff test. Mobile is personal. Broadband is a household affair. The promise of cross-selling vanished under scrutiny, like mist in a boardroom projector beam.

I made the case. We did it anyway.

But then - just months from launch - something rare happened. We paused. Not for strategy. Not for second thoughts. For the customer. The team had picked up on a real frustration: customers were being sold a speed, only to receive something very different. So we stopped the presses. Re-engineered the journey. Built a proposition that sold not promises but realities. We tested the line, priced accordingly, and told the truth.

Six months later, we launched with a product that put customer trust front and center. And it worked. Take-up surged. Retention was better. People liked being told the truth. Who knew?

Yet in the long run, I wasn’t wrong either. Despite the customer love, the business never reached the scale it needed to survive on its own. The synergies didn’t materialise. Eventually, the base was sold - not for scrap, but for strategy. Another infrastructure player saw the value, bought the base, and moved it to add scale to their platform.

So who was right? Arguably, both of us. But more importantly, I learned something more valuable than market dynamics or scale curves. I learned the quiet, compounding power of being customer-led.

Not customer-aware. Not customer-sympathetic. Relentlessly customer-led.

That lesson - hard-earned and half-won - is one I have never forgotten. Because sometimes, being late to the market doesn’t matter. But being late to the customer is a failure you can’t pivot out of.