Part One: Strategy · The stance of the business
When one person pays and another uses, as with advertising or a manager buying for a team, the product bends toward the payer. Yet it only works if the person using it is well served.
A product listens hardest to whoever pays for it. When that is also the person using it, the arrangement more or less corrects itself. When it is not, the product slowly turns to face the money.
In software sold to companies, the payer is a director who will never do the work. The buyer wants dashboards, controls, audit trails and a good answer for procurement. Those get built first, because they close deals. The clerk who enters forty orders a day gets whatever is left, and has no say.
The neglect comes back to the payer. Staff route around a tool they hate, the director's dashboards fill with bad data, and at renewal someone notices that nobody uses it. The clerk's experience is what the director was really buying.
A dispatch tool is chosen by the operations head of a freight company, who asks for delivery records she can search. Its makers spend a day riding along with drivers, and find that the notes are typed with cold thumbs in a cab, in as few words as possible. They put a voice note button on the first screen. Nobody on the buying side had asked for it.
Advertising is the harder case, and design cannot fix it. The advertiser pays for attention, so every choice tilts toward holding people longer and learning more about them. A team inside such a product can refuse the worst of it. It cannot make the product face the person using it while someone else pays. That is decided when the business model is chosen. If you want the person to come first, find a way for the person to pay.
Therefore:
Know who pays and who uses. Where they differ inside a customer, give the people who use it a standing voice in what gets built. Where an advertiser pays, the product faces the advertiser, so change who pays.
In practice. For the last five things built at a buyer's request, write down what each cost the people who use the product daily: a step, a field, an interruption. Then ask those people.
Goes with. The split is sharpest when THE PEOPLE WHO MUST AGREE (33) are choosing and when a product is SET UP BY ONE, USED BY MANY (38). It decides what you may collect in TRUSTED WITH THEIR DATA (58).