Of course you should listen to your customers. But the wrong way to listen to your customers, is just to add features or just to read their emails and take them literally. You have to analyse the reasons behind their requests. Why do they want this feature? What problem are they trying to solve with that?<p>When you are doing usability tests, you don't just listen to the user explaining whats going wrong you are watching him. Often the user explains that there is a problem with your buttons but in reality he just has a problem with some descriptions. What the user thinks and what he does are two different sides of the same coin. You need to find out "What is the problem?" and solve it.<p>The user might say "I need larger buttons on my phone, they are too small" but the problem might be that he makes many mistakes. Now this is a totally different problem and you can solve it in many way (auto correct features, voice recogn,... or something totally new).<p>Now if you find a big problem with big business potential most users will have this problem, but the won't be aware of it.<p>Think about Dyson, everyone had this problem, you have to buy bags for your vacuum cleaner, but this wasn't problem most people were aware of. Now Dyson solved it and instantly everybody was aware of it.<p>Think about phones, they ahd more and more features, but most user were not able to use them. Now Apple solved that, most features of iphone where available before the iphone but suddenly people where aware these features existed and they could use them.<p>Listen to customers, but don't do it "literally" ;-)
He has a point. For years his customers have been telling him to get some f-ing defence, but Cuban just won't listen. And lets face it, those 120-110 games the Mavericks keep coming up with are a lot of fun to watch. Especially if you are not really a Mavericks fan.
The basic point of this is good, but the post borders on the linkbait side. If you take the title literally, you won't have a business left! You should always listen to your customers. You shouldn't give in to their requests easily of course. But I'd much rather deal with a company that will listen to me and shrug me off than a company that won't even do the first step.<p>Nothing's more important to me than having a <i>real</i> human being listening to and at least acknowledging my requests.
Cuban's title is wrong for his post. Obviously, if your customers think a new product sucks, you should listen, right? Apple didn't sink billions of dollars into AppleTV.
A big problem with listening to your customers is that you're often listening to individual customers. The problems they would like you to solve can't be fixed the way they suggest because it would cripple the system/community as a whole.<p>This is because users will often have a pretty egocentric view of how their experience can be enhanced. They do not understand this will never work when it's applied to all users.
It's silly to boil this down to a black and white issue, because it's not. "Listening to your customers" is not equal to relinquishing creative control of your product's direction. It means that you, as a company, address the day-to-day pain points that your users experience while using your software. That's it.