Product Management: Don’t listen to your customer

I’ve encountered countless scenarios where our team was flooded with a barrage of feature requests from our user base. They were all well-intentioned, of course, brimming with the ambition to help us create a better product. But the question that I constantly found myself grappling with was, “Who do you listen to?”

In my experience, giving an ear to every user and actioning every feature request is a recipe for disaster. This approach, more often than not, leads to a bloated product, filled to the brim with unnecessary features. Similarly, focusing solely on the needs of your most valuable customers can still lead to under-utilized additions.

This conundrum led me to a profound realization, a notion encapsulated perfectly by Steve Jobs’ quote, “It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.”

The heart of the issue lies in understanding that most feature requests are presented as solutions, not problems. The danger of this is that customers, while experts in their needs and pains, are not always adept at devising effective solutions.

As the ones creating and developing the product, that is our job. It’s our responsibility to delve deeper, to investigate and comprehend the root of the problem, in other words, to try to understand why a user needs the feature and ultimately design…