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Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build

blog.tailwindapp.com

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Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build

#11

Post by squozzer »

basseq wrote: post #7
api wrote: post #2

This 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…

Which is what they got, from a certain point of view.

Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build

#12

Post by rpeden »

atopiler wrote: post #8
rpeden wrote: post #4

I 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…

Ha, sounds like a good part 2 to me! :)

As you pointed out, you did allude to it in the article. I was just trying to add a bit more based on first hand experience with software customers.

And hey, sometimes customers will just flat out tell you that they need a feature that is blindingly obvious to them, but didn't occur to your product development team. It's nice when it is that easy.

So I agree that the knowing how to interpret what your customers say is and important part of being able to act on what they share with you. That certainly doesn't diminish the importance of anything you wrote, though. Without engaging with customers and properly listening to them, there wouldn't be any information to interpret.

Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build

#13

Post by sambe »

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.

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.

Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build

#14

Post by danieltillett »

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.

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.

Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build

#15

Post by atopiler »

sambe wrote: post #13

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 appr…

Very true. The helicopter vs. rush hour example is kind of like finding the holy grail, and that's what you strive for. In practice, the majority the improvements you can extract from these conversations end up being much smaller. But many small improvements compound and also help create the invaluable customer feeling of "Hey, I feel like the team behind this product really gets me!"

Also, well put: "You probably don't know better than them AND they probably don't know what they want."

Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build

#16

Post by davidmchris »

rpeden wrote: post #12
atopiler wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ha, sounds like a good part 2 to me! :) As you pointed out, you did allude to it in the article. I was just trying to add a bit more based on first hand experience with software customers. And hey, sometimes customers will just flat out tell you that they need a feature that is blindingly obvious to them, but didn't occur to your product development team. It's nice when it is that easy. So I agree that the knowing ho…

It's great feedback.

Here's what Alex (atopiler) Slacked me yesterday after he read the article in draft "One thing that I felt didn’t really come through fully was some of the true essence of cust-dev calls. This is the product snob in me talking, but it felt a bit like we're listening to what our customers wish for, and we build what they tell us to build. When it comes down to it though, what the calls really reveal, and what we’re really trying to understand more deeply than anything else is what are biggest problems and frustrations they’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis? Why are these things frustrating? Why do they put themselves through that frustration? And what would it enable them to do if those problems didn’t exist?"

And that became that middle section.

Thanks to all of these comments I'm seeing the light of what he was really getting at there and I've salted the headline and some of the earlier passages to set that up a little better.

p.s. this is my intro to HackerNews - you guys are awesome.

Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build

#17

Post by atopiler »

rpeden wrote: post #12
atopiler wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ha, sounds like a good part 2 to me! :) As you pointed out, you did allude to it in the article. I was just trying to add a bit more based on first hand experience with software customers. And hey, sometimes customers will just flat out tell you that they need a feature that is blindingly obvious to them, but didn't occur to your product development team. It's nice when it is that easy. So I agree that the knowing ho…

Absolutely - huge thanks for reading and for the thoughtful replies!

Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build

#19

Post by chinedufn »

sambe wrote: post #13

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 appr…

Great point about the signal to noise ratio. One interesting thing there is how the ratios differ between a mostly emotional experience (a new social platform for example) vs.. say.. a product that helps the user make more money (most B2B). You'll often have much less noise when all of your users want roughly the same specific thing. But, like you said, there's definitely still a bunch of noise.

Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build

#20

Post by fredgrott »

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.

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.

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