Listen to Your Customers

My law professor taught me one of the most important lessons ever, "listen to people who disagree with you." It's as relevant to law as it is to product development.

New product ideas are constantly coming to my attention. Someone has an idea and devises a market for it. Unfortunately, a lot of times it works better if the market tells you what it wants and the product development teams go about making a product to suit the needs of the end users. In market research we fall victim to "confirmation bias". That's our tendency to hear what we want to hear, to ignore things that don't fit our way of thinking and to hear more of what confirms what we may already believe. And worse still we want to make things happen so we are predisposed to say yes. I find it very liberating to say no these days. Next time someone proposes a new product ask them, "Can you prove there's a big enough market for this product?"