In the next two minutes
List the first five inherited decisions.
A Customer Healthcheck pattern
You are leading something you did not build
How deep it runs depends on your answers.
Take the Customer Healthcheck
Your answers point at inheritance.
An acquisition, a replatform, a restructure, or tenure long enough to outlast the people who made the original calls. You're accountable for a product full of decisions nobody still in the building can explain.
This is the hardest of the four. Telstra Health had eighteen acquired companies with little to nothing shared between them. The difficulty is political. Every part of the product has someone attached to it, and every change risks breaking something you don't fully understand.
The symptom you'll recognise: You have a clear view of what should change, and you haven't moved, because you can't define the territory and defend the risk.
The tool
The Inheritance Map.
It bolts onto your stakeholder map. The inherited decision. Who made it. Who still defends it. What customers actually do there. The customer impact of changing it. The political risk of changing it.
- 01
List every inherited decision that shapes the customer journey, and pay attention in stakeholder meetings to who holds which narrative.
- 02
Find the evidence of what customers do there.
- 03
Name the person attached, and what they'd say.
- 04
Score impact and risk, and sort each decision into move now, build the case, tidy as you go, or leave for later.
- 05
Build your first ninety days from the move-now box.
This week
Name who is attached to each.
This quarter
Run your first ninety days from the move-now box.
The map turns a political problem into a sequence, and a sequence is something you can defend in a leadership meeting.
Want help fixing this?
Read the offer document. It shows exactly how my team and I would start, with quick wins in the first weeks.
Your template
Why you got this result
In sixteen years I have met maybe two companies that didn't care about their customers at all.
For everyone else, the evidence was already scattered across their analytics, the support queue and the session recordings. It just never reached the room where the roadmap gets decided.