Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
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Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
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Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#2This is both true and dangerous advice.
You must listen to your customers, but then you must conceptualize their needs, prioritize them, and think about how to solve those needs well.
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.
TL;DR: It's not listen -> implement. It's listen -> THINK -> implement.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#3This is both true and dangerous advice. You must listen to your customers, but then you must conceptualize their needs, prioritize them, and think about how to solve those needs well . 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. TL;DR: It's not listen -> impleme…
Couldn't agree more. Very very well said.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#4I agree that doing more listening than speaking when talking to customers is important.
It's also important to remember that customers will 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.
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.
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 really 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.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#5This is both true and dangerous advice. You must listen to your customers, but then you must conceptualize their needs, prioritize them, and think about how to solve those needs well . 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. TL;DR: It's not listen -> impleme…
Couldn't agree more. Very very well said.
Sometimes there can be value in doing rapid shallow MVP type iteration with key customers, but there should ideally be a step between that and stuff going into the mainline product where somebody thinks.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#6This is both true and dangerous advice. You must listen to your customers, but then you must conceptualize their needs, prioritize them, and think about how to solve those needs well . 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. TL;DR: It's not listen -> impleme…
Yup. To be blunt, customers often don't know what they need. Often they don't even know what their real problems are.
But they know what their pain points are, and a good BA or Product Manager/Owner will know how to dig into those pain points and unearth the real problems that need solving, and how best to go about solving them.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#7This is both true and dangerous advice. You must listen to your customers, but then you must conceptualize their needs, prioritize them, and think about how to solve those needs well . 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. TL;DR: It's not listen -> impleme…
Most people will read this title as, "Build what your customers tell you to build." The key here is that most customers will be happy to tell you they want all kinds of features and the best/only solution or feature looks like X. You have to go deeper. You have to listen to understand what they actually need.
I hate being that guy that trots out a quote from a historic figure, but c'mon, this is a slam dunk:
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#8I agree that doing more listening than speaking when talking to customers is important. It's also important to remember that customers will 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. This often helps more than just listening to features they say they want. If your customers aren…
Great points! Being willing to listen is step 1. That's the product culture that needs to exist first and foremost. Completely agree with you: knowing what to do with the feedback you receive, and how to interpret it in order to innovate and solve real problems is the key that I firmly believe drives the ultimate success of a product. That's a product development/design problem that's alluded to in the middle of the article, but hard to really do it justice in a few small blurbs. Feels like a good topic to be the subject of its own stand-alone post as a follow-up to this one :)
"Part 2: Listen to Your Customers, but Don't Do Everything They Say" haha.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#9This is both true and dangerous advice. You must listen to your customers, but then you must conceptualize their needs, prioritize them, and think about how to solve those needs well . 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. TL;DR: It's not listen -> impleme…
Most people will read this title as, "Build what your customers tell you to build." The key here is that most customers will be happy to tell you they want all kinds of features and the best/only solution or feature looks like X. You have to go deeper. You have to listen to understand what they actually need. I hate being that guy that trots out a quote from a historic figure, but c'mon, this is a slam dunk: "If I ha…
Boom shakalaka! Perfect quote.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#10This is both true and dangerous advice. You must listen to your customers, but then you must conceptualize their needs, prioritize them, and think about how to solve those needs well . 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. TL;DR: It's not listen -> impleme…
Most people will read this title as, "Build what your customers tell you to build." The key here is that most customers will be happy to tell you they want all kinds of features and the best/only solution or feature looks like X. You have to go deeper. You have to listen to understand what they actually need. I hate being that guy that trots out a quote from a historic figure, but c'mon, this is a slam dunk: "If I ha…
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