If there’s one pattern I’ve seen repeat across every stage of company growth from early-stage scrappiness to scaled execution it’s this: as companies grow, distance creeps in.
The same happens to leaders. The closer they get to managing outcomes, the further they could drift from the people who experience them - the customers. Not intentionally, but gradually.
Calendars fill up with strategy reviews instead of support calls, dashboards replace conversations, and somewhere along the way, we stop hearing the raw, unfiltered voice of the user.
Yet, that connection i.e the ability to feel what customers feel is what fuels great products. It’s what helps us make the decisions that dashboards can’t. And if we’re not careful, growth can quietly erode that muscle.
That’s why this week’s piece hit home for me. I’ve partnered with Enterpret, who just released The Modern Customer Connection Framework, a high-signal low-noise report that addresses exactly this problem.
The report doesn’t romanticize customer obsession or turn AI into magic.
It shows how AI can become muscle: the connective tissue that helps leaders rebuild empathy at scale, even as their organizations grow and distance creeps in.
The Scaling Paradox
Your first hundred customers? You knew them all. You built with them, not just for them. When something broke, you fixed it overnight. When they won, you celebrated with them.
Then came growth. The customer base multiplied, the company scaled, and conversations slowly turned into reports. What once made your product beloved, i.e proximity, intuition, empathy, got buried under systems and processes.
Enterpret calls this the Scaling Paradox. And if you’ve ever led a product team, you’ve lived it. Not because you stopped caring, but because growth demands a different kind of attention.
This drift happens because of 3 reasons:
Feedback is scattered across tools and teams, creating competing versions of customer truth.
Front‑line insights struggle to reach the right decision‑makers at the right time.
Executives lose direct exposure to authentic voices and see only sanitized summaries.
The Framework That Brings Connection Back
What I love about Enterpret’s perspective is that it doesn’t guilt-trip you into “talk to more customers.” Instead, it gives you a structured way to bring the customer’s voice back into the rhythm of the company.
It breaks down into three core layers that together form The Modern Customer Connection Framework.
Customer Intelligence Platforms. The foundation layer. AI-powered systems that unify every customer signal support tickets, sales calls, reviews, surveys, and social comments into one coherent narrative. No more fragmented truths. No more “who owns what.” Just one customer reality shared across teams.
Insights Activation. The action layer. Most organizations don’t struggle with a lack of insight; they struggle with a lack of movement. This pillar focuses on embedding customer intelligence into actual decision-making.
The report highlights a few anecdotes from organisations that have implemented this layer, such as how Figma co-produces Voice-of-Customer reports with customer-facing teams, Canva pairs every KPI with a user story or video, and Monday.com embeds “knowledge managers” directly into product pods. The message is simple: intelligence doesn’t influence through presentation, it does so through integration.
Immersion Experiences. The empathy layer. Even with the best analytics, data can’t replicate emotion. This pillar focuses on designing rituals that rebuild empathy into company culture. DoorDash’s WeDash program requires every employee, including the CEO, to deliver orders.
Stripe brings customers into leadership meetings. Canva sets OKRs that require closing the feedback loop with every user who provides input. It reframes empathy as a system, not a sentiment.
Download the full report and framework (free access)
What I Found Most Interesting
Three ideas from this report stayed with me:
First, the fragmentation of truth. As feedback channels multiply, teams start living in competing versions of customer reality. Leaders think they’re customer-centric but are often responding to filtered summaries several layers removed from the actual voice of the user.
Second, insights as workflow, not presentation. The framework moves beyond “centralize feedback” to “operationalize empathy.” Imagine if every roadmap kickoff started with a short reel of customer conversations or if every sprint review required a Voice-of-Customer checkpoint. That’s how you turn understanding into reflex.
Third, the ROI of empathy. The final section of the report, Measuring ROI, connects empathy directly to business outcomes. Chick-fil-A protecting millions in potential lost revenue through rapid sentiment response. Slack prioritizing feature investments based on ARR coverage of customer requests. Notion reducing report turnaround from two weeks to three days. It’s empathy meeting economics, and that’s the bridge leaders often need to keep investing in it.
Why This Matters Now
For years, product leaders faced a false choice: stay small and close to customers or grow and lose intimacy. AI has finally broken that trade-off.
Tasks that once required teams of analysts aggregating feedback, identifying sentiment, surfacing themes can now happen in real time. But the real breakthrough isn’t automation. It’s amplification. AI gives back what scale quietly took away: proximity, awareness, and emotional context.
Closing Thought
Customer connection used to be a value. Then it became a process. Now it can become infrastructure.
As product builders and leaders, our role isn’t to protect empathy, it’s to scale it. That’s the real promise of AI in product work: not replacing our intuition, but amplifying it.