[evancharles]

Customers are also a great source of project ideas. You can pick a customer, like "small business owner" or "wealth advisor," and interview them.

My favorite question that leads to ideas is "tell me everything you did from when you started your day until now," and dig into all the annoying/painful things they mention.

[danicgross]

Yes! In many ways, all your initial idea needs to be is a launch pad. Once you get your foot in the door, you can always refine based on what users tell you.

Per your point, it's important to learn from their workflow, not ask them what they want. When you ask someone what they want, they often perform attribute substitution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution) and answer a different question.

[got2surf]

Great point. Also important that your customers may not even know what is possible, so they won't know to ask for it directly. Instead, if we ask why they want something, we can understand their intents - and translate that into technology.

We've seen this a lot with text analytics - instead of trying to repeat what humans do manually (reading/annotating), we try to understand the questions that clients are interested in (the drivers behind their current workflow).

[mgummelt]

The Sources of Innovation by von Hippel [1] tries to answer this question of when innovation comes from users vs. manufacturers vs. suppliers. The book is nearly unreadable, but the topic is interesting.

[1] http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www-old/books/sources/SofI.pdf

[jeff_marshall]

This kind of question is a gold mine, IME. When I interview network protocol devs, my favorite question is:

"tell me what happens between the time you type something into the address bar and when you see a result". so many opportunities to show understanding at various levels there.

[jeff_marshall]

The reaction here is interesting, but it won't change my opinion without concrete feedback. Please tell me why this opinion is wrong.

[rabidrat]

I think your comment is being downvoted because it's irrelevant. The discussion is about "how to figure out what to build" and you pivoted to an interview question you like to use. So it's wrong conversationally, not factually.