

Mark Cuban: Why You Should Never Listen to Your Customers  - dwwoelfel
http://blogmaverick.com/2010/04/06/why-you-should-never-listen-to-your-customers/

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fbailey
Of course you should listen to your customers. But the wrong way to listen to
your customers, is just to add features or just to read their emails and take
them literally. You have to analyse the reasons behind their requests. Why do
they want this feature? What problem are they trying to solve with that?

When you are doing usability tests, you don't just listen to the user
explaining whats going wrong you are watching him. Often the user explains
that there is a problem with your buttons but in reality he just has a problem
with some descriptions. What the user thinks and what he does are two
different sides of the same coin. You need to find out "What is the problem?"
and solve it.

The user might say "I need larger buttons on my phone, they are too small" but
the problem might be that he makes many mistakes. Now this is a totally
different problem and you can solve it in many way (auto correct features,
voice recogn,... or something totally new).

Now if you find a big problem with big business potential most users will have
this problem, but the won't be aware of it.

Think about Dyson, everyone had this problem, you have to buy bags for your
vacuum cleaner, but this wasn't problem most people were aware of. Now Dyson
solved it and instantly everybody was aware of it.

Think about phones, they ahd more and more features, but most user were not
able to use them. Now Apple solved that, most features of iphone where
available before the iphone but suddenly people where aware these features
existed and they could use them.

Listen to customers, but don't do it "literally" ;-)

------
richcollins
Asking your customers what to do is not the same thing as listening to your
customers. Listening to customers is essential to success.

------
absconditus
"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."
-- Henry Ford

~~~
staunch
As my co-founder said when I threw that one in his face: "Sure, but he would
learn that one of their big problems was speed."

~~~
TheSOB88
Didn't he know that? Didn't the original model solve that problem?

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hexis
Customers are great at finding bugs, but not so great at developing features.

~~~
hassy
Or: let users influence tactics, but not strategy.

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hristov
He has a point. For years his customers have been telling him to get some
f-ing defence, but Cuban just won't listen. And lets face it, those 120-110
games the Mavericks keep coming up with are a lot of fun to watch. Especially
if you are not really a Mavericks fan.

~~~
coryl
Yeah but his fans also want a championship, and not early round playoff exits.

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j_baker
The basic point of this is good, but the post borders on the linkbait side. If
you take the title literally, you won't have a business left! You should
always listen to your customers. You shouldn't give in to their requests
easily of course. But I'd much rather deal with a company that will listen to
me and shrug me off than a company that won't even do the first step.

Nothing's more important to me than having a _real_ human being listening to
and at least acknowledging my requests.

~~~
pak
All good bloggers know how to linkbait every once in a while... it's the most
reliable way to sustain traffic.

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duncanj
Cuban's title is wrong for his post. Obviously, if your customers think a new
product sucks, you should listen, right? Apple didn't sink billions of dollars
into AppleTV.

~~~
roc
Seems pretty clear he's speaking within the context of features/functionality.

~~~
scott_s
It's clear after you start reading the post. It's not clear from the title.
Hence dunacnj's point that the title is "wrong."

~~~
roc
I guess it comes down to how you approach it.

I had no reason to expect a statement trivially-falsifiable when held to the
standard of universal truth was meant to be taken as such. So I assumed there
was a particular context relevant to the assertion and was unsurprised to find
that there was.

If you approach article titles expecting to find absolute logical precision,
I'd imagine this is but one of many 'wrong' titles.

~~~
scott_s
I knew the title couldn't mean what it literally meant. But I find that style
of title if not "wrong" at least "bad." That the literal interpretation is
obviously wrong is the intent; it lures you into reading the post to find out
what exactly the author means by it. This is in opposition to a good title,
which succinctly states the main point and lures you into reading by being an
interesting idea.

I consider this technique linkbaiting.

~~~
roc
I absolutely agree with that. On the axis of truth vs marketing, this is
definitely out toward marketing. I don't think this is _quite_ as bad as
linkbaiting, but it's surely kin.

I guess I just misunderstood what you'd meant by 'wrong'.

~~~
scott_s
That's why I said "wrong," to make sure it was clear I was using someone
else's word. I probably would have said "misleading." And that was my first
thought after reading through enough of the post to understand what he was
really saying. I don't like posts where someone makes a provocative statement,
then jumps through hoops to redefine words or attach different semantics to
make it fit.

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sssparkkk
A big problem with listening to your customers is that you're often listening
to individual customers. The problems they would like you to solve can't be
fixed the way they suggest because it would cripple the system/community as a
whole.

This is because users will often have a pretty egocentric view of how their
experience can be enhanced. They do not understand this will never work when
it's applied to all users.

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fretlessjazz
It's silly to boil this down to a black and white issue, because it's not.
"Listening to your customers" is not equal to relinquishing creative control
of your product's direction. It means that you, as a company, address the day-
to-day pain points that your users experience while using your software.
That's it.

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alex1
Is this why the iPhone didn't have copy/paste and MMS for the first 2 years?

~~~
redstripe
The flip side is that sometimes a company can be too "clever" trying to invent
something better when they could just copy.

For example, Microsoft waffled for years before adding tabs to IE. They wanted
to find a better way manage multiple pages. I think most people still prefer
tabs to their "clever" image thumbnail thing. So all they did was waste a few
years not implementing an existing feature that their customers were all
asking for.

This blog entry reads like a Malcom Gladwell story with it's selection bias.
Innovating in itself is not enough if the features you're spending time on are
not going to be a big success. That's why you still need to keep copying
successful features from competitors. They've already done most of the hard
work.

~~~
ssp
_I think most people still prefer tabs to their "clever" image_

Tabs is web browsers are evidence of some fundamental brokenness with the web.
I think Microsoft's designers probably instinctively hated the idea, just like
Apple's probably did (Safari didn't (doesn't?) have tabs turned on by
default).

It's far from clear to me that most people are comfortable with the concept of
dynamically managed tabs. Clearly computer nerds do like them though.

