The danger of listening to customers

Doing proper user research is key to making great products and services, but there is a difference between learning from your customers - and doing exactly as they say.

Your customers are the least qualified people to come up with solutions - Dave Wascha

Customers won’t give you a list of their needs, they will give you a list of half baked solutions to their needs. If you do exactly as they ask you will end up with a Frankenstein product. To compound this issue, taking something out of a product can be a lot harder than putting it in. If other systems start to rely on that feature being there removing it means testing and changing those, adding features no-one uses increases product-debt.

There is a problem trying to figure out what people want by canvassing them. I mean, if Henry Ford canvassed people on whether or not he should build a motor car, they’d probably tell him what they really wanted was a faster horse - John McNeece

Products that are filled with requests from sales are marketing teams because they need “just one more thing” to make a sale, end up with a products full of features that no one uses.

The purpose of speaking to customers is to understand the job they are trying to do, and the forces at play that push them one way or another to decide on which product they ultimately buy.