Are Customers Driving Your Product?

I recently did a post on Seattle 2.0 about listening to consumer feedback.  The recent customer uproar of the Facebook re-design prompted this post.  I basically agree with other online luminaries around how you shouldn't always listen to customer feedback.  When you are trying to innovate in a rapidly growing space (early in your product life cycle), consumers need to be led. It is rare that a customer is going to come up with the next big idea.  You could spend more time listening to feedback and trying to please everyone. 

For example, at WidgetBucks, we don't spend time asking customers what new ad styles we should be developing.  We put the ad containers into our publisher network and look at the data in real-time.  There are times when we do things that we obviously need to listen to.  Examples, are timing of publisher payments, response time to customer service emails, etc., but, it is rare that we get someone emailing us with a new type of ad widget idea.  We've got some ideas on how to build out some full-page ads that ad a gaming experience, live video, etc.  Per below, here is an example. 

We'll most likely work with select publishers and look at the performance of the ad from a revenue perspective, load time, etc.  But, we didn't ask customers on whether we should be innovating in our ad formats.  We know for our customers that they are looking for alternatives to traditional display ads.

Comments

[Derek Preston]

A good subject Matt. I would add that the difference between useful and not useful customer feedback can usually be traced to the kind of questions you asked them. If you're asking people "What do you think of this?" or "What would you do differently with this?" you're assuming a level of expertise that usually isn't there. You also end up with a lot of contradictory and anecdotal commentary that's hard to translate into meaningful design input. What is often more educational is to ask your customers what problem they think your service/product is helping them solve and what they perceive their biggest challenges around that product to be. Also, what other activities/products/services do they engage when involved in solving the same kind of problem. If you can focus them on explaining their desires and habits rather than asking them for on-the-fly product development help you might learn some things that your team can elevate to new business ideas.