
Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build - chinedufn
http://blog.tailwindapp.com/listen-to-your-customers-and-theyll-tell-you-what-to-build/
======
rpeden
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'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.

~~~
Kurimo
I agree with most of your points.

I would add that when you put a person in a position that you have asked them
for input, they will feel pressured to give SOME kind of input, whether or not
it is actually warranted. You're kind of setting them up to give input in the
same way you might set someone up to tell a joke, they feel pressured to fill
that space with SOMETHING.

Most of the time when I have built features that came from customers, it ends
up being the least used feature of a particular update cycle. Sometimes to the
point that we have to reverse or highly modify it later. The reason your
customer isn't in the business of making the thing you're making, is because
they have no idea how to make that thing.

If you ask a person what they want out of a new Ford car, they are not going
to say "Brake pads with a higher durability for longer use," they are going to
say "More cupholders wouldn't hurt, and maybe you could offer it in magenta?"

See also "The Bike Shed Problem": [http://bikeshed.org/](http://bikeshed.org/)

~~~
dsr_
Instead, you need to ask your customer about what they are doing in areas
around your software. Not "What would you like in a new car?" but "What have
you been doing in your car?" and "How much maintenance do you have to do?" and
"What's the worst thing about the stuff you do in the car?"

Then maybe you can find out that the brakes make a squealing sound because
they are mis-adjusted and are wearing out the pads too early.

------
jasode
There can be counterexamples to that advice. Maybe since Tailwind is in the
B2B space, this affects their bias of the recommendation.

If you're in the Enterprise/SaaS/B2B space, it seems more common to closely
track what your (paying) customers want.

However, if you're in B2C or mass market, there are successful examples of
being bold with providing something your customers _didn 't ask for_. 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.

It's the modern variation of Ford's apocryphal _" if I had asked people what
they wanted, they would have said faster horses."_

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.

Setting aside the missteps by Apple, a creative startup could identify with
Steve Jobs saying, _" customer's don't know what they want until we've shown
them."_

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2006/09/06/facebook-users-revolt-
face...](https://techcrunch.com/2006/09/06/facebook-users-revolt-facebook-
replies/)

~~~
joeyspn
> It's the modern variation of Ford's apocryphal "if I had asked people what
> they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

This x100 times. After building several B2B products I've found that the most
successful features are the ones the customers weren't expecting and didn't
ask for...

It's ok to do customer development in order to track what your users want and
at least cover their expectations, but you'll never create amazing products
with this mentality...

Relevant: "Obvious to you. Amazing to others."

[https://sivers.org/obvious](https://sivers.org/obvious)

~~~
atopiler
"You'll never create amazing products with this mentality..."

I think that this kinda misses the point. If you're only building the things
they explicitly ask for, then yes, you're right. However, customer development
isn't mean to track what your users want and cover their expectations; it's to
uncover the biggest pain points/real problems to come up with amazing
solutions for - what's actually _worth_ pursuing and potentially building? How
exactly those solutions manifest themselves often times does not come directly
from customers, but the amazing ones are just as often inspired by insights
gleaned from customer development.

The article you shared actually backs up my point exactly. Example: what could
be obvious to one of your customers can end up being amazing to you and your
other customers. In practice, I've found this dynamic play out time and time
again.

------
ProxCoques
Hi - UX designer here. So shoot me.

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 _observing_ that audience.

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.

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.

~~~
shalmanese
Users are a source for problems, not solutions, that's the designer's job.
However, the most common way that users articulate problems is in the form of
solutions. It's then the designer's job to reverse engineer what the problem
is from the proposed solution and design a solution that both fixes the
problem and is contextually appropriate to the rest of the product.

So when you listen to users and they tell you "you should do X", just blindly
doing X is a path to failure but similarly ignoring them is also a path to
failure.

There's an art to properly eliciting insight from users and it's a mix of
observation, interrogation and thought. In general, the best advice I've found
is focus on the emotional and not the logical. When you ask when was the last
time you had a problem with our product, you force the user to come up with
ad-hoc logical arguments and paradigms that are most often wrong. If you ask
when was the last time you were frustrated or annoyed with our product, you
hone in much more reliably on real sticking points.

~~~
sriku
One of my teachers used to express this succinctly the following way -

Imagine a patient going to a doctor and asking a course of antibiotics. Any
doctor would erase that request and start asking the patient to describe their
problem. This, he said, is the core of how a user feedback conversation should
go.

------
fnordsensei
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.

People will communicate and confront you with their strategies for fulfilling
the need they have rather than communicating the need itself.

Learning to "listen for needs" is not only valuable for conflict resolution,
but also for service development.

~~~
grandalf
This is very true. I'm going to read the NVC book after reading your comment.

Similarly, I've found that users often express all sorts of suggestions for
how to accomplish some need they have. While many of their ideas are (from a
UX/design standpoint) horrible, the core need is valid and often highlight
something important that has been misunderstood or overlooked by the design.

The hardest people to get "needs" information from are intelligent, computer-
literate people, who are often unwilling to admit that they find something
counter-intuitive, and often frame their feedback in a way that conceals that
fact... But who will end up not using something because of the friction that a
suboptimal design causes.

I've also found it helpful to let people draw mocks of their solutions with a
sharpie and to also share my own impromptu sharpie mocks with them based on
their feedback.

At the very least, this process makes them feel respected and lower their
guard which can often help them share information that is helpful in designing
a product.

The craziest moments are when it turns out after weeks of trying to understand
a user's feedback, that the user simply wanted a report view of some
information and was trying to give feedback to make an interaction design turn
into a report. This is quite common, especially in a feedback group where the
highest status person is the manager who does actually need a report but is
offering general feedback on general usability.

------
api
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 -> implement. It's listen -> THINK -> implement.

~~~
basseq
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."

~~~
dbg31415
> I hate being that guy that trots out a quote from a historic figure...

Don't worry, it was a made up quote. You're safe.

~~~
basseq
1) I can't believe I missed the "trot out" pun in my original comment.

2) Anyone who's interested to read more on this made-up quote should see this
HBR article:

[https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-
fast](https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast)

------
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.

~~~
Nition
This is true. And the bigger a company is the more there is to trawl through.

Still, you get stuff like this 14 page thread dating back two years asking
Dropbox to stop forcing new folders to automatically sync[1], or this 10 page
thread spanning 3½ years where adding an external email to hotmail/outlook.com
was broken[2]. Never any official response, just moderators posting form
responses like robots. Those are where I feel things have gotten a bit
ridiculous, when the company stops ever interacting with the customers at all.

[1] [https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox/Stop-auto-
inheriting...](https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox/Stop-auto-inheriting-
new-folders-when-using-selective-sync/idi-p/4630)

[2] [https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
us/outlook_com/forum/oemail...](https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
us/outlook_com/forum/oemail-osend/theres-a-problem-connecting-to-the-smtp-
mail/bf2fc06d-5e19-43dc-9cda-76bd038e36bf?page=1)

~~~
dawnerd
Oh my god I can't stand moderator responses. Worse when they're just
copy+paste and they didn't even read your request/question. Been happening on
Github more and more too with issues.

~~~
Nition
Sounds like you're having some trouble with forum moderators.

To allow me to fully assist with your issue, can you please make sure you've
completed the following steps:

\- Restart your PC.

\- Copy down any annoying messages from moderators that you see.

\- Try reading the messages again to see if you feel better about them now.

If this message was helpful, please remember to upvote and mark as SOLVED.

------
kjhughes

       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.
    

\-- Steve Jobs ( _The Entrepreneur of the Decade_ , Inc Magazine, April 1989,
[http://www.inc.com/magazine/19890401/5602.html](http://www.inc.com/magazine/19890401/5602.html))

------
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.

~~~
atopiler
I have to whole-heartedly disagree with this. Customer development and
feedback don't just apply to short-term marketing and minor-point
improvements. That couldn't be further from the truth.

The "They'll tell you what to build" isn't meant to be taken literally. If you
listen and try to truly understand people's problems, they'll guide you
towards the most useful solutions. Coming up with those solutions is still up
to you in most cases, though.

Re: Apple - they understood the real problems that their potential customers
had. No, customers didn't come and tell them to go and build a device like the
iPhone. However, from understanding the market and the pain points that people
had with mobile phones, Apple was able to identify an opportunity to enter a
new market and disrupt it.

~~~
pedalpete
Actually, I'd suggest people did tell them to build the iPhone, and the iPod.

They looked at the problems with the MP3 market at the time, tiny devices with
poor user-interfaces and their solution to the state of the market at the time
was the iPod. Unexpected from Apple which was only a computer company at the
time.

Once we had our iPods we were carrying around an iPod and a phone (Blackberry
was huge at the time). They understood customers wanted a single device, it
had to have great messaging like a blackberry, and do all the music and video
needs of an iPod of that era. Blackberry had apps, a web-browser, maps, etc.
It's important not to forget that. Apple did a better job with the browser and
gave the thing a full-size touch screen. Customers didn't ask for that, but
they had asked for the basic device. Apple took what was asked for and put
their own scrutiny to it to see just how amazing they could make it.

------
SN76477
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.

I was thinking, wow, he is just talking sending sms messages. The crowd would
laugh or woot in what seemed to be agreement.

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.

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.

I did find the video .. someone else noticed the same thing.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UeINnBMFA4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UeINnBMFA4)

------
pedalpete
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".

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

------
kozak
The thin font is super unreadable on my Galaxy S4.

~~~
jwatte
Same here, one plus one.

------
rcavezza
I read an amazing book on customer development: The Mom Test by Rob
Fitzpatrick - [https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-
everyone/...](https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-
everyone/dp/1492180742)

The first few pages blew my mind. It was a great read all the way through.

~~~
davidivadavid
Having read several customer development books, I second that recommendation.

One of the main takeaways of the book is that you should always start by
asking factual questions. What do you do. What software do you use to do that.
When's the last time you did that. How did you feel about it. Etc.

No "What ifs", no "would yous." Don't ask how much they would pay if [you
could code whatever feature by next week].

That may seem obvious, but most people go for the second type of question
right away.

------
arca_vorago
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.

For example, Michelangelo was told to paint certain things, but it's _how_ he
did it that made him legend.

The real beauty, the real success of a thing, lies in the how, not necessarily
the what.

~~~
atopiler
Agree 100%. Great analogy.

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

It's 1901. I want a horse and buggy that can go 55 mph.

------
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.

------
wbsun
Interesting, I am wondering whether Apple listened to its customers or not
when they firstly built iPod, iPhone and iPad...

------
phn
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.

Just blindly doing what your customers tell you is _not_ what you should be
doing, it's just design by committee on a massive scale.

------
crimsonalucard
IMO, this is trivial advice. It is obvious to sell people things they tell you
to sell to them.

True business acumen comes from understanding two things that are not as
obvious:

1\. A customer often does Not Know what he wants.

2\. What a man wants is malleable and can be shaped and influenced by forces
created by other men.

------
paulddraper
They'll tell you what they like, but not always what you should do about it.

> If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses

------
cdevs
Imagine the frankenlaptop the Mac would be if Apple ever listened to its
customers? CD-ROM , touch screen, fm radio, infrared whatevs

------
donatj
And you'll get faster horses all around.

~~~
Namrog84
This the difference of listening to what your customers literally say and
being able to deduce what it is what they need.

"I want faster (or better) horses". Needs a follow up question or ability to
understand the deeper core meaning. From the above quote. These are some off
top of head self distilled thoughts on what that means

I want to get from point a to b faster. (faster vehicle or teleportation.)

I want less time traveling.

I want less prep time for traveling(E. G. Saddling horse).

I don't want to take care of my means f transportation (offer a stable service
or offer non animal vehicle)

I want my destination closer.(urban)

I don't want to go to the store to buy X. (delivery service. Ala amazon?)

I want faster Internet vs I want to reach my final destination faster are
similar but different outcomes.

Would you rather have Google load pages 100x faster or have above 99% chance
to guess the site you really wanted/needed.

~~~
atopiler
Amazing! That is the true essence of customer development.

When you walk into a hardware store and ask for a 2-inch drill bit, it's not
the tool you really want. What you really want is a 2-inch hole in the wall.

------
vinceguidry
What if you don't have any customers?

~~~
logicallee
Then ignore the stupid advice in the title and likely article (I just skimmed
but only saw noise) and instead of listening to anyone else, build something
amazingly great. Seriously, build something amazing and then tell people about
it.

Nobody is going to tell you how to do it. it has to come from you.

~~~
atopiler
The point is to talk to people to know whether something you want to build is
actually going to be great before you go and build it. Most of the time when
people go and build what they think is "great" they end up realizing that
nobody actually cares. It's a sure-fire way to waste a ton of time of money,
which for startups, are the two scarcest resources you have.

~~~
logicallee
this actually isn't bad advice for idiots. so if you're an idiot, by all means
it's probably better to ask someone, "how'd you like it if" rather than build
it and see. As a great example, everyone knows people like battery life. So if
you're an idiot, a great question to ask your customers might be, 'How'd you
like it if we made a giant battery, like a car battery, that you can take
along as an external battery booster for your next Samsung, so that you can
just have it connected and have 72 days of life. It would be deep discharge,
so that you have hundreds or thousands of cycles." Why did I use this example?
Because only an idiot would ask any customers this. It's idiotic. But if
you're the kind of idiot who would make that - then by all means! _ask them_.

On the other hand, steve jobs didn't need to ask his customers how they'd like
an iphone - he told them why they'll like it.

------
known
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" \-- Knuth

