If your customers tell you they want a faster horse, you’re asking the wrong questions

This is a bold statement, but I contend that no concept has been more misused in the software industry than the infamous Henry Ford quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

How many times has this been used as a blanket excuse to not talk to customers about what they want from your product? You need to be doing this ALL THE TIME. But you have to be asking the right questions. You should NOT be asking them to design your software. That’s…your job.

So given that Henry Ford was a pretty successful guy, here’s how I imagine the conversation between him and prospective car buyers might have actually gone down. I’m guessing what he heard was how faster transportation from point A to point B would transform their lives and businesses. They may have expressed this as wanting a faster horse, but I’m guessing Ford understood the underlying pain point. And of course he didn’t flat out ask them “what they wanted.” Not because talking to customers isn’t valuable, but because he knew better than to ask them to come up with the solution.

Here’s a real-world example. I came into an organization a few years ago to run Product. The company had a mobile productivity app for consumers which had seen a significant drop in its viral growth after a recent redesign. I was brought in to try to fix it. So I focused on trying to understand what customers were hoping to get out of the app, where they had seen success before, and where they were struggling now. I did this with various methods, but two of the most important were looking at what customers were asking for (written up as feature requests in Jira) and talking to the customers themselves.

I spent many many hours combing through the backlog in Jira to see what customer requests were bubbling to the top. And there was one that had been around for a really long time and just kept coming up over and over. The app’s main feature was providing a “notebook” structure for saving your own notes and content from the web. The app visually presented these as notebooks, and customers could customize various aspects like the cover images, background colors, etc. They could also drag and drop the content and visually place it where it made sense to them. But within the notebook you could only have individual items. You couldn’t place other notebooks within a given notebook. And “notebooks within notebooks” was what they said they wanted.

When I talked to the teams about why this feature kept being punted when it was requested so frequently, what I heard was that the request was “stupid” because customers could achieve the same thing by using tags. If they tagged the notebooks they wanted to correlate to each other, they could search on the tag and see everything. Seemingly a perfect example of why you shouldn’t ask your customers what they wanted because they are going to ask for something silly that you already had!

But here’s the thing. I had talked to a bunch of customers. I didn’t ask them what they wanted the app to do, but I still understood exactly why they were asking for “notebooks within notebooks” and why the current solution wasn’t meeting that need. I had asked them first of all to tell me a bit about themselves. What they did for a living. Why they were looking for a productivity app. What kind of content they wanted to save there. What they hoped to achieve. Which other apps they may have tried in the past and why they didn’t like them. Why they had wanted to give ours a try. What appealed to them about it.

One thing was overwhelmingly clear from these conversations: what they wanted — what they liked about our app — was visual organization. And in this context, tags were not a good solution. Tags are by nature structured and list-like. Exactly the opposite of what the customers liked about our app.

We had a stellar design team. We could have made a really cool visual representation of placing your “notebooks within notebooks” that would have delighted our customers, if only we had asked the right questions to understand what they were truly saying.

Sadly the company didn’t make it, for lots of complex reasons in addition to the simple reason which is that most startups don’t. I didn’t put my foot down on creating the killer notebooks within notebooks experience, and I never got the chance to do it.

It wouldn’t have changed things, but I still regret not building that feature. Because what are we doing here if we’re not giving our customers an experience that surpasses their wildest dreams?

***Talk to your customers!!***