Many entrepreneurs and small business owners argue that you should always listen to your customers. In fact, the popular lean startup principles advocate listening to your customers and iterating early and often.
But listening to customers – and responding to your customers’ suggestions by implementing all or many of them – are not the same thing. As Steve Jobs wisely said:
Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.
Unfortunately, many businesses fail because their leaders lose focus while trying to incorporate all (or many) of their customers’ suggestions. It’s easy to fall prey to the “yes’ mentality. Saying yes makes us happy. We believe that saying yes is more likely to cause the customer to buy our product or service. Saying yes makes our customers happy.
Ultimately, don’t we want happy customers?
Of course we do. But making customers temporarily happy while destroying your company is, in my opinion, an unacceptable cost. No company has unlimited resources and when you say yes to customers – you’re committing – and often, over-committing – those resources.
If you’re creating software, you end up with bloated software and a terrible user experience. If you’re creating products, you end up with a complex and expensive product.
Henry Ford famously said:
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
Many people reading Henry Ford’s quote conclude that innovation is driven by your own ideas – and not by ideas suggested by your customers. After all, how could people who use horses and buggies come up with the idea for a horseless “car”?
The reality is that listening and innovation go hand in hand. Steve Jobs was only partially right. You shouldn’t say yes to everything. But you also shouldn’t ignore what your customers say. The key is in how you listen – and what you do after you understand what your customers are saying.
Part of the answer lies in asking good questions. The quality of answers to your questions depend on the quality of your questions. Ask stupid questions and you’ll get stupid answers. Ask broad questions and you’ll get broad answers.
Moreover, how well you listen is measured not merely by your ability to hear WHAT the customer is suggesting – but also by your ability to understand your customer’s point of view. If enough customers tell you that there’s something wrong with your product, then there probably is something wrong. That doesn’t mean you should change the product at the whim of your customers – but it does mean that you should understand WHY your customers are having trouble with your product and deal with the underlying issues causing problems for customers.
More often than not, you’ll end up saying no to dozens, hundreds, and often thousands of suggestions from your customers. If you don’t – you’ll go out of business.
But how can you say “no” to a customer without discouraging them?
