I agree that doing more listening than speaking when talking to customers is important.<p>It's also important to remember that customers <i>will</i> tell you they want features they they won't actually use or pay for. So it's necessary to develop an understanding of what your customers do and what problems they're trying to solve.<p>This often helps more than just listening to features they say they want. If your customers aren't in the business of building products (especially software products), their ability to ask for features is limited by the fact that if you're not an expert in how the product is created, it is difficult or impossible to know what features might be easy to add, and which ones are difficult.<p>It's even likely that you can add features that your customers that your customers don't even know are possible. In this case, they won't be able to ask for those features, or anything like them. As an expert (in software, or any other specialized product development field), taking the time to <i>really</i> understand your customers, the problems they face, and the jobs they are trying to accomplish can help you come up with new features and products that actually amaze your your customers and attract new ones.
There can be counterexamples to that advice. Maybe since Tailwind is in the B2B space, this affects their bias of the recommendation.<p>If you're in the Enterprise/SaaS/B2B space, it seems more common to closely track what your (paying) customers want.<p>However, if you're in B2C or mass market, there are successful examples of being bold with providing something your customers <i>didn't ask for</i>. An example is the Facebook "newsfeed" feature rollout in 2006.[1] They initially had a user revolt over it but Mark Z and his team stuck to their guns and sure enough, the newsfeed became addictive and contributed to the envious engagement metrics that Myspace/Friendster couldn't match.<p>It's the modern variation of Ford's apocryphal <i>"if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."</i><p>But that doesn't mean all counter-intuitive decisions by businesses always make sense. Steve Jobs removing the floppy drive on iMac met disapprovals and eventually was vindicated by fast USB adoption ... but the jury is still out on removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7.<p>Setting aside the missteps by Apple, a creative startup could identify with Steve Jobs saying, <i>"customer's don't know what they want until we've shown them."</i><p>[1] <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2006/09/06/facebook-users-revolt-facebook-replies/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2006/09/06/facebook-users-revolt-face...</a>
Hi - UX designer here. So shoot me.<p>Firstly, you might consider that close to all basic ideas behind objectively successful products (eg the telephone, Facebook, photo copiers, Twitter, rabbit vibrators) were NOT arrived at by asking the target audience what they wanted. Most were intuition born of <i>observing</i> that audience.<p>When you ask people direct questions about what they want, it takes a great deal skill and judgement to actually get a successful product idea from that. In fact it's almost not worth the bother, and few professional designers really do it very often by choice. Far better to try to observe what people do (often by giving them tasks to complete in some sphere of activity) and see what comes out of that. You might see your target audience performing needless operations, misunderstanding things, or doing things that appear irrational to you but rational to them. Once you see that sort of thing happening, it's far easier then to see what they might need or really want.<p>I wouldn't go so far to say that asking people what they want is a bad idea, but it's getting close. Perhaps it's a mildly toxic idea best avoided in preference to observation.
Working as a designer, I've come to appreciate a lot of the ideas in Non Violent Communication. This is more or less the central idea of NVC: needs are very low level and highly likely to be shared by many people, whereas the strategies used to fulfil those needs are much more specialized and particular to a person or a small number of people.<p>People will communicate and confront you with their strategies for fulfilling the need they have rather than communicating the need itself.<p>Learning to "listen for needs" is not only valuable for conflict resolution, but also for service development.
This is both true and dangerous advice.<p>You must listen to your customers, but then you must conceptualize their needs, prioritize them, and think about how to solve those needs <i>well</i>.<p>There is nothing worse than a "Christmas tree product" where every customer has hung some requirement and there is no conceptual unity or design. Loads of "enterprise" products are hairballs like this.<p>TL;DR: It's not listen -> implement. It's listen -> THINK -> implement.
The signal to noise ratio tends to be poor though. So many will insist and swear and beg and threaten about what they think they need, or what they used to do, or what they won't pay for but would like to have if it's free and maintained indefinitely. There's often a background noise of "all change is bad" and some improvements are not as clear as helicopter vs rush hour traffic, so the benefit will take time to appreciate.<p>The trick, of course - and rather old news - is reading between the lines and not becoming arrogant in response to the lower quality feedback. You probably don't know better than them AND they probably don't know what they want.
<p><pre><code> You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them.
By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.
</code></pre>
-- Steve Jobs (<i>The Entrepreneur of the Decade</i>, Inc Magazine, April 1989, <a href="http://www.inc.com/magazine/19890401/5602.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.inc.com/magazine/19890401/5602.html</a>)
If Apple did that than they would been out of business 25 years ago.. Steve Jobs did not ask Apple customers what to build but predicted what in the future apple should build to get more customers.<p>This is not to say that customer feedback is not important but to clarify that it pertains to very short-term marketing in that it only refers to somewhat minor-point increments in fine-tuning the current product.
I was watching Seinfeld recently. It was a 90s skit of him talking about the answering machine. How sometimes you would be disappointed if someone answered the phone.<p>I was thinking, wow, he is just talking sending sms messages. The crowd would laugh or woot in what seemed to be agreement.<p>He didn't know what he wanted, but there was a problem that he and everyone wanted a solution for. At the time in the 90s, it was a social problem (not wanting to waste time with an annoying person on the phone) but in the 2000's that problem was solved with technology.<p>A lot of times, customers do not know what they want. Imagine what Jerry's answer would have been if we had asked him a question about pinging his contacts list to know if they were available in 1991. He wouldn't have understood and honestly, no one would want to carry around a massive rolodex at the time, so the answer would have been silly at best.<p>I did find the video .. someone else noticed the same thing.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UeINnBMFA4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UeINnBMFA4</a>
I've been doing lots of customer interviews lately, and I'm absolutely loving it. I think this bit of advice from the article is dead wrong "know exactly who you want to talk to and what you want to know".<p>I've got a product that is growing nicely and that users love, but we haven't been able to monetize it yet. Lots of other comments point to things like Ford's (misattributed) "they'd say I want a faster horse".<p>Don't ask people directly what they want, find out what they are doing, what they need to do, and you'll start to find a pattern emerge.<p>The reason I feel you can't know what you want to find out or discuss is that you can miss exactly what the customer is telling you.<p>In my experience, I will often ask pointed questions about what more we can do, and I get blank stares and uses just say "it's great" and give me requests for minor improvements. When I probe them about other parts of their business, they open up about what they are doing in other segments which to them are completely different than what we do, but when I point out the similarity, and what we could do in these other areas to help them out, they perk right up and come up with a bunch of good ideas that they are happy to pay for.<p>So be flexible, and look for patterns more than answers. I'd also suggest, if you're in the same place as I am looking to monetize an existing product that most see as free, ask where they are spending money and see if there is opportunity for those funds to be re-allocated to you.
I read an amazing book on customer development: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick - <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/dp/1492180742" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/...</a><p>The first few pages blew my mind. It was a great read all the way through.
I think there needs to be a certain separation between the artist and the customer, in the sense that the customer says what they want, but how you get there is part of the artistry.<p>For example, Michelangelo was told to paint certain things, but it's <i>how</i> he did it that made him legend.<p>The real beauty, the real success of a thing, lies in the how, not necessarily the what.
Ultimately somebody involved has to make the decision of what is needed. The customer often doesn't know exactly what they need and even more often does not know what is realistic. The developer often doesn't understand the problem(s) and even more often has little idea of why the customer is doing what they are doing.<p>There really is no substitute for having someone (or a team) study the area in detail who has the background to be able to understand the problem(s) and is able to translate this understanding into a development plan. For anything but the most trivial problems this requires a large investment in time, money and effort.
One thing is listening and acting based on what you understood, which you should definitely be doing. This requires product planning and thinking, as any you've ever done.<p>Just blindly doing what your customers tell you is <i>not</i> what you should be doing, it's just design by committee on a massive scale.
IMO, this is trivial advice. It is obvious to sell people things they tell you to sell to them.<p>True business acumen comes from understanding two things that are not as obvious:<p>1. A customer often does Not Know what he wants.<p>2. What a man wants is malleable and can be shaped and influenced by forces created by other men.
They'll tell you what they like, but not always what you should do about it.<p>> If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses