Customer, Buyer, User, Beneficiary

“The customer is always right,” that’s what they say. Product managers are supposed to be “the voice of the customer” on product teams, and I often found myself thinking about what we really meant by “customer.” Often times the advice I would find in product literature was ambiguous, not wrong, just a bit confusing. After all, user experience designers are supposed to understand a product’s “users,” right?

Economic Buyer

This is whoever pays the bill for a new product or service, and often they don’t even end up using it.

Think of the CTO of a tech company. Often times in medium to large companies, they’re so busy with executive duties, they most often delegate their technical work. They do, however, weigh in on major purchases like which cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) to offer their teams.

Users

These are the ones who actually use the product, and they’re also the ones who most directly realize the core value propositions of the products and services they’re using.

Beneficiary

These are downstream customers, typically from the users, who benefit from the value proposition unlocked by the product.

If you buy a washing machine, then you and your partner use it, your kids will benefit.

If a CTO picks Google Cloud Firebase, their software engineers use it to develop, and product managers could benefit from faster shipping of features like notifications, analytics, user authentication, etc.

Bonus: Partners

And then there are the people and companies we partner with.