The customer isn't always right

How do you build a product when the one thing you're "supposed" to be doing doesn't work.

One of the hardest parts of building a company is figuring out when to listen to your customers.

But isn’t the customer always right?

Wrong.

That might be true in service businesses and restaurants, but in software it’s most definitely not.

And I mean this quite literally. If you listen exactly to what your customers want, and you build pixel-by-pixel the feature they’re looking for, and rinse & repeat across many customers - you will end up building exactly the wrong thing.

How does that happen? How do so many seemingly “right” actions add up to a big wrong? It’s because by following everyone’s advice verbatim, your product will become a good fit for no-one.

It’ll lack coherence. It’ll likely be too complicated. Your product will look like a blindly put together mesh of buttons and toggles, with jagged edges and corners.

Now the cliche product advice here is: ”listen to their problems, not their solutions”

And that holds a lot of truth. If you poke and prod at their “feature suggestions”, you’ll figure out why they want that feature. And often, you’ll find a way to solve their problems with existing options. Or you’ll help them realize that they don’t actually want what they think they want. Or you’ll realize that what they’re looking for is very specific to them, not really valuable for most people.

Directionally, they might be on to something. But remember that it’s your responsibility to build the product, not theirs. And you have this responsibility towards all your users, not just that one customer.

But, there’s a problem. That advice just isn’t very useful.

Practically, the fog between listening to your customers vs. ignoring them is so hazy. Especially in high stakes situations.

• What happens when a customer holds you at gunpoint, threatening that they’ll leave because “this one feature is make or break”? Or that they can’t join your platform because it’s missing “just this one thing”?
• What happens when you already have a roadmap packed with 100 other valuable features (that have come from their own customer conversations), and there’s pressure to fit “just one more thing”?
• Do you stop what you’re currently working on? What gets dropped? What suffers?

In the moment, it’s so tempting to commit.

To say “yes”, “I’m sure we can add that one thing”, “That doesn’t seem hard, give us a few days”. To say whatever you can to get that sale.

One more customer, just one more. Anything for that sweet, sweet MRR…

Don’t do it. It’s a mistake.

I know because I’ve said all those things before, and regretted it each time. And I’m still tempted to do it.

It gets even more hairy when you know what they’re asking for is in fact, useful. Then the temptation rises. Your mind starts racing. “What if there’s an easy way to make this happen?” “Maybe I’ll try and build it this weekend, how hard could it be?”

So what’s the solution? Honestly….. I don’t know.

I wish there was a phrase or sentence I could give you, which would make it easier to decide. A silver bullet. But I don’t have it. I wish I did.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely things you can do to help. For example:

1. Never commit to anything on the spot. Ask a ton of questions to figure out the underlying problem, what they’re doing currently, what their ideal solution would look like, etc. But at the end, always say “Awesome, that’s really great feedback. I’ll pass that on to the team and let you know”.
   • PS: This works even in cases where there’s no team.
2. Give yourself time. This was a great tip from my cofounder - create space between the initial request, and the decision. It’s so easy to get swept up in the emotion of the call, and try to shuffle the entire roadmap immediately after. I'm super prone to this, so having a night’s sleep or some time away from the decision makes a big difference in the outcome.
3. Ask yourself some tough questions. Good questions are like gold, they cut through the noise when making tough decisions better than anything else. Here are some that work well for me:
   • Is what they’re asking for valuable to most of our customers, most of the time? Great one that I got from my time doing Product at Shopify.
   • If this customer wasn’t joining or making this request, would we still shuffle our roadmap to build this?
   • If this customer leaves a few months from now after we’ve built it, are we going to regret it? Are we willing to pay the “maintenance” cost of having this feature, permanently in our product?

Ultimately, making product choices will still always be a bit foggy.

Just remember that this fog is your responsibility to navigate. You are the maker, not your customers.

You must wander the fog alone.