|
|
|
|
|
|
by duxup
2789 days ago
|
|
|
I don't entirely disagree, but I've seen taking these concepts too far blow up just as often as building without input (at least in my experience). In those cases a company finally gets a customer, usually a big one(s) (everyone sees mega dollar signs and maybe they get a taste of it), and then that customer monopolizes the development demands to the point that the product and development are laser focused on the whims of a company or handful of companies, and not something that everyone else who isn't engaged in the process will buy. It gets worse when those companies don't REALLY know what they will actually buy or keep long term, as they're used to effectively just picking from a list of what is available. When given a chance to influence development they often will make odd corner case choices that are legit annoyances with existing products or their own problems.... but absolutely won't sell the product at the end of the day or over keep them as a customer the long term. They won't tell you what really works already because they only really recall problems with past products. It's a delicate balance. Getting user input is hugely important, but they're not going to tell you the truth all the time, and they don't always know it. Sales guys, also don't necessarily know what it is either. I've been on both ends where I was all "OMFG engineering did you think about how people use this!?!? Did you ask anyone??" and "This product is now only useful to one company because all we do is take user input and make widgets what the hell is going on???" |
|
|
The purpose of speaking to customers first before building is to find out how much demand there is for the product and how much they're willing to pay for.
It's to find out that there is really only one company or a few that want this... before possibly wasting your time building it.
If someone knowingly goes into building a product for a single customer, then that had better been a conscious decision, knowing the ramifications of that. Be aware of it and don't let it be something that just happens.
In any case, for engineers, speaking to customers before building is not the default. So there's a strategy that they are going out of their way to adopt, for a specific purpose. So they need to do it right, not half-assed, and design the app for a large number of users with input from a good amount of people, otherwise their single main customer who will have them by the balls.
The market researcher should go into it knowing that the user cannot always list out exactly what they want. Everything the market researcher should do is purposeful, to try to discover what that thing that needs to exist really is, how big the addressable market is, and for how much money the market will bear. It's a whole strategy... And it's a better strategy than building without working with real actionable data from a sample of the actual future users.