What Skate Punks Teach Us About Product Development
Skateboarding as we know it today was born through trespassing, as Tony Alva and friends broke into Los Angeles-area backyards and shredded the sh*t out of empty swimming pools.
In the 1970s, store-bought skateboards were plastic toys, used in controlled environments. Skating was just a novelty… but soon it would become a way of life. Day after day, these innovative punks would modify their homemade boards, bringing the refined specs to whomever would fabricate a deck that could handle the then-alien environment of vert skating.
Yeah, these teens wanted skateboards, but they wanted better skateboards. Different skateboards.
These kids pissed off entire neighborhoods, and created a global subculture which has influenced everything from sports to fashion to urban planning.
When you picture a skateboard in your mind, what you’re seeing is the result of sustained customer input. The collective input of end users can be a powerful tool for the innovator.
Desires Can Shape History
Respecting the ingenuity of the end user was not always on the product-development agenda. Henry Ford was not big on market research, hence the persistence of a quote often attributed to him: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Sure, he almost certainly never said it, but that quote speaks to a seductive yet self-destructive entrepreneurial mindset that you’ve probably encountered somewhere along the line.
What if Henry Ford had asked potential customers what they wanted? The world may have become a very different place. Would early American urban planning have been bent to the collective will of cyclists, cruising around in multi-rider human-powered vehicles, stopping at municipally-implemented repair stations to refill their tires?
Ford did not invent the modern car; that would be Karl Benz, ten years earlier. So a petrol-run personal vehicle was the new hotness at the time, but it was beyond the reach of the 99%. Ford presumed, with a high degree of accuracy, that the larger public also wanted cars. But was that all that they wanted?
Would turn-of-the-last-century commuters have asked for an electric car? We could have ended up with a world less dependent on fossil fuels.
The economic model underpinning the Model T and the assembly line was presumptive as well: Ford envisioned “affordable” to mean “one person could own his or her own car”, and that was not unreasonable. However, as the surge of the sharing economy shows, it’s not the only definition of the term.
If asked, would we have collectively invented car-sharing over a hundred years ago, freeing ourselves from the debt that partially characterizes North American society?
Or maybe we’d all be riding around on robot horses. Tying them to cast-iron hitching posts. We’ll never know, because Ford never asked. Later that same century, another mode of transportation — skateboarding — was redefined by customer input in the now-quaint era of landlines and word-of-mouth.
Next, we’ll see what happens when the internet allows your customers to help you… or compete with you.
