Jobs, Ford and Customer Research

Martin checks in with some choice quotes on customer research -

I just found this.  

https://www.helpscout.net/blog/why-steve-jobs-never-listened-to-his-customers/

It also reminded me of the Henry Ford Quote ... "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

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The article misses a key point: we experience a problem, and then we try to buy the solution (test the idea).  This gives us necessary and sufficient customer feedback to go after one iteration: enough orders from customers to cover a suppliers minimum in a workable amount of time, profitably.

There is a difference between going to the customer for ideas and and testing your ideas on customers.

Apple had plenty of spectacular failures, Lisa the worst...  

I agree on focus groups being a bad idea because focus groups are not customers...  there is more than enough info coming back from customers to work on the next iteration...

if you are using focus groups, you either have bad communications internally or you do not like what you hear from the sales department.

There is enough feedback in the process to get the next step right.

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