| Back up even farther, though - SO MANY PRODUCTS are literally indistinguishable outside of marketing. I think the issue is much deeper than "don't let marketing make product decisions". Browse through any app store - click a category, and it's a sea of apps that provide essentially the same capabilities. Just like your grocery store has a sea of jars filled with slightly varying salsa. So take the diagram in the article: Customers asked for it: Check. Customers would benefit from it: Check. We built/tested/shipped it: Check. What's the missing step? Did ANYONE fucking buy it?!?! And it turns out none of the other steps actually matter compared to the last one, if the goal is to remain a functioning company. |
> Customers would benefit from it: Check.
The key is in what the word "it" means. The answers are positive if by "it" you mean "this category of product". They may very well be negative if by "it" you mean "our particular product".
The customers want a jar of salsa. They don't want, and never asked for, your particular variation of a jar of salsa, essentially identical to 10 other variations except for a differently designed label.
Another tricky bit is in the "asked for" part. For most products on the planet, customers don't really ask for anything. The market isn't structured this way. Products are just dumped on the market, and those that sell survive. This is wasteful, but has some benefits. It would just be better if marketing wasn't there to meddle with things, artificially sustaining more variations of a product than needed.