Structure follows strategy. Strategy follows customers. It all starts with a customer.

• Who is your target customer segment?
• Who is your best customer?
• What is your best customer’s profile? How do we recognize them?
• What does your customer need? What is necessary in your customer’s life?
• What does your customer want? What is your customer’s preference?
• How will you collect that data? How much data do you need?
• How will you analyze that data?
• How will you verify the accuracy of your analysis?

Strategy follows customers?

• Based on what your customer needs, what is necessary in your customer’s life, what product or service can you produce to satisfy that need?
• Will your customer be willing to pay a price for your product or service that allows you to make a reasonable profit?
• In the profit for your product or service, is there enough volume to sustain your company’s operation?
• Is your product or service exclusive to your company, or do competitors offer a similar product or service perceived on an equal basis?
• Based on your customer’s preference, what will make your customer decline your competitor’s offering and buy from you? What is your competitive advantage?
• How can you create that competitive advantage in a way that is sustainable, difficult or impossible to copy by your competitor?
• How can you effectively communicate the competitive advantage to your customer?
• How can you operationalize your competitive advantage to make is real, observable and obvious?

Your responses to these questions will guide your structure.

• What core functions do you need to create the product or service your customer needs?
• What support functions do you need to meet your customer’s preferences in the way they want to buy?
• In each function, what is the level of work required to sustainably produce the desired outputs?
• In what way does each function need to integrate with its neighboring functions related to work handoffs?
• What is the output capacity of each function, and how does its output match the output capacity of its neighboring functions?

Customers drives strategy, strategy drives structure.