Customers Do Not Always Know What They Want

“That is exactly what product strategy is all about – figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.” –Ben Horowitz, in The Hard Thing About Hard Things

One important aspect of product management is knowing when to ignore customer feedback and instead rely upon your own understanding. It turns out that relying on your own intuition and market understanding can often be very valuable.

Steve Jobs is famous for doing things that others would never had dreamed of articulating they want. People never would have told Steve Jobs that they wanted to be able to tough a piece of glass all the time without buttons to run their phone and their applications. He made it happen and played a hunch.

It is a very tricky thing to be both customer development focused, data-driven, and still play the hunches necessary to build something wonderful that solves a customer’s problems.

Customer’s very rarely know exactly how to articulate their problems very well. More often than not they have become so immersed in the status quo that they do not see how things could be better. In customer development, it is really helpful to find those that are unsettled with the way things are currently done – that recognize things could be better.

What are your thoughts on how much prospective customers should influence your startup’s product management approach?