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Discussion on: Do NOT give your customers what they want

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

The real piece of advice is to listen to the underlying problems that your customers have.
Customers don't care about your solutions, what should they?, but they will only buy something that adresses their underlying pain points.

By listening to its customers Henry Ford understood the underlying problem with transports by horse was that it is too slow. Had he listened even more carefully, he could have discovered a second underlying need: horses take too much place and pollute too much in the city. The invention of the car solved the first need but failed at addressing the second one and today the urbanism of US cities (except the old ones) is ironically... horse shit.

By the way there is a mythology skillfully built around Steve Jobs, but apart that nobody else will invent the iPhone, even the iPhone itself is an incremental innovation, based on hard innovative work especially from the government, the military, scientists and also a few big companies to invent the internet, the web, GPS, touch-screen, mobile networks, mp3, email, maps, youtube... Apple mostly built a coherent and very lucrative marketing package on top of all that. Progress is always standing on the shoulders of giants.

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polterguy profile image
Thomas Hansen

The real piece of advice is to listen to the underlying problems that your customers have

Bingo!

By the way there is a mythology around Steve Jobs, but apart that nobody else will invent the iPhone

I used to own a Qtek 1010, it was released 8 years before the iPhone. However, the iPhone was lightyears ahead of Qtek and other Pocket PC based phones when it was released - Especially in regards to UX ...

Still, the point is valid. You could compare Magic to Microsoft Access, FoxPro or Clipper, and say it's an ancient idea too, the same way Alan Kay delivered the Newton for Apple already in the late 1980s, which arguably was the first version of in iPad, etc, etc, etc ...

Innovation never exists in a vacuum - However, if you only deliver what people wants you to deliver, you might as well give up immediately, since you're destined to lose ...