[n0w]

> Remember: it’s your job to come up with the solution, not the customer’s. When you go back to ask them questions, ensure you’re not simply asking them to design the solution for you. If they could do that, they’d probably have done it already. If they could have done it but didn’t, it’s because the problem doesn’t matter much.

You talk to customers to better understand the problems they face and how valuable a solution might be.

Not for ideas or suggestions.

Once you've built a thing, you talk to customers to understand _how well_ your thing solves their problem.

None of this necessitates incremental solutions.

[Lutger]

Exactly. This is the most important part people just don't get. Customers are really, really bad at solving their own problems. In my domain, they all come up with a crude and barely functioning variant of excel in a web browser.

Listening to a customer is not some manual variant of a mechanical A/B test. You really need to immerse yourself in their world and peel off all the things they say that gets in the way of the problem. Its a skill of empathy.

I think the real 10x leaps that 'create new markets' don't just conjure up problems out of thin air: they are novel ways of solving a familiar problem. At best, they solve problems for which people have come to accept the lack of a good solution and thus don't articulate as problems anymore.

In the most extreme case, an innovation creates a new problem in the sense that suddenly a desirable alternative for the status quo can be imagined where it couldn't before. To me, that still implies the innovator just deeply listened to the customer and discovered a potential problem others failed to recognize.