Mark Cuban: Why You Should Never Listen to Your Customers | Hacker News Reader

Mark Cuban: Why You Should Never Listen to Your Customers

blogmaverick.com

85 pointsdwwoelfel33 comments

Of course you should listen to your customers. But the wrong way to listen to your customers, is just to add features or just to read their emails and take them literally. You have to analyse the reasons behind their requests. Why do they want this feature? What problem are they trying to solve with that?

When you are doing usability tests, you don't just listen to the user explaining whats going wrong you are watching him. Often the user explains that there is a problem with your buttons but in reality he just has a problem with some descriptions. What the user thinks and what he does are two different sides of the same coin. You need to find out "What is the problem?" and solve it.

The user might say "I need larger buttons on my phone, they are too small" but the problem might be that he makes many mistakes. Now this is a totally different problem and you can solve it in many way (auto correct features, voice recogn,... or something totally new).

Now if you find a big problem with big business potential most users will have this problem, but the won't be aware of it.

Think about Dyson, everyone had this problem, you have to buy bags for your vacuum cleaner, but this wasn't problem most people were aware of. Now Dyson solved it and instantly everybody was aware of it.

Think about phones, they ahd more and more features, but most user were not able to use them. Now Apple solved that, most features of iphone where available before the iphone but suddenly people where aware these features existed and they could use them.

Listen to customers, but don't do it "literally" ;-)

Asking your customers what to do is not the same thing as listening to your customers. Listening to customers is essential to success.

"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." -- Henry Ford

As my co-founder said when I threw that one in his face: "Sure, but he would learn that one of their big problems was speed."

Didn't he know that? Didn't the original model solve that problem?

If you need your customer to define your product strategy, you're in the wrong business. But listening to your customer to decide whether your product benefits from cup holders instead of cigarette lighters is just refining your strategy.

Customers are great at finding bugs, but not so great at developing features.

Or: let users influence tactics, but not strategy.

He has a point. For years his customers have been telling him to get some f-ing defence, but Cuban just won't listen. And lets face it, those 120-110 games the Mavericks keep coming up with are a lot of fun to watch. Especially if you are not really a Mavericks fan.

Yeah but his fans also want a championship, and not early round playoff exits.

The basic point of this is good, but the post borders on the linkbait side. If you take the title literally, you won't have a business left! You should always listen to your customers. You shouldn't give in to their requests easily of course. But I'd much rather deal with a company that will listen to me and shrug me off than a company that won't even do the first step.

Nothing's more important to me than having a real human being listening to and at least acknowledging my requests.

All good bloggers know how to linkbait every once in a while... it's the most reliable way to sustain traffic.

Cuban's title is wrong for his post. Obviously, if your customers think a new product sucks, you should listen, right? Apple didn't sink billions of dollars into AppleTV.

No, it's bang on. The customer needs a Labrador retriever for the fall duck hunt, but if you ask them what they want, you'll get a general sense of water, weeds, fur, four legs and a bill -- you know, like, those, whadayacallem birds you hunt have -- and no matter how carefully you try to clarify things, the best they can actually describe is a platypus. I say that as the builder of many platypii over the years. Customers always come up with a platypus until you show them a Lab -- and it's our job to know what a Lab is in their world.

On the other hand, a domesticated platypus would be pretty awesome. You know, if they weren't poisonous.

Which is to say, a platypus isn't always the wrong choice, despite being goofy and seemingly impractical.

Sure. We just build way more of them than people need :-)

Seems pretty clear he's speaking within the context of features/functionality.

Yeah, sometimes it's not that you have to add more capability (features) to a product, it's that you have to make the features that exist easier to use.

It's clear after you start reading the post. It's not clear from the title. Hence dunacnj's point that the title is "wrong."

I guess it comes down to how you approach it.

I had no reason to expect a statement trivially-falsifiable when held to the standard of universal truth was meant to be taken as such. So I assumed there was a particular context relevant to the assertion and was unsurprised to find that there was.

If you approach article titles expecting to find absolute logical precision, I'd imagine this is but one of many 'wrong' titles.

I knew the title couldn't mean what it literally meant. But I find that style of title if not "wrong" at least "bad." That the literal interpretation is obviously wrong is the intent; it lures you into reading the post to find out what exactly the author means by it. This is in opposition to a good title, which succinctly states the main point and lures you into reading by being an interesting idea.

I consider this technique linkbaiting.

I absolutely agree with that. On the axis of truth vs marketing, this is definitely out toward marketing. I don't think this is quite as bad as linkbaiting, but it's surely kin.

I guess I just misunderstood what you'd meant by 'wrong'.

That's why I said "wrong," to make sure it was clear I was using someone else's word. I probably would have said "misleading." And that was my first thought after reading through enough of the post to understand what he was really saying. I don't like posts where someone makes a provocative statement, then jumps through hoops to redefine words or attach different semantics to make it fit.

Maybe a better title would be: Why you should never listen to your customers until after they've tried out your new product.

It's still far too easy to ask the wrong questions. One of my favorite podcasts, popSiren over at Revision3[0], had a great first season. But then they had a survey and asked viewers what they wanted to see more of. The second season turned into just another "cool websites" podcast, and completely stopped being interesting or entertaining. Viewership fell through the floor, and the show was dropped.

[0] http://revision3.com/popsiren/launch

A big problem with listening to your customers is that you're often listening to individual customers. The problems they would like you to solve can't be fixed the way they suggest because it would cripple the system/community as a whole.

This is because users will often have a pretty egocentric view of how their experience can be enhanced. They do not understand this will never work when it's applied to all users.

It's silly to boil this down to a black and white issue, because it's not. "Listening to your customers" is not equal to relinquishing creative control of your product's direction. It means that you, as a company, address the day-to-day pain points that your users experience while using your software. That's it.

Is this why the iPhone didn't have copy/paste and MMS for the first 2 years?

Well, imagine what Apple would have lost if they took another two years to work out these features with nothing actually on the market. They smartly decided being a first mover with a completely radical design would outweigh ticking off every box in the feature list.

Besides, both those features are purely a software matter--a perfect place to iterate after the hardware is in people's hands.

The flip side is that sometimes a company can be too "clever" trying to invent something better when they could just copy.

For example, Microsoft waffled for years before adding tabs to IE. They wanted to find a better way manage multiple pages. I think most people still prefer tabs to their "clever" image thumbnail thing. So all they did was waste a few years not implementing an existing feature that their customers were all asking for.

This blog entry reads like a Malcom Gladwell story with it's selection bias. Innovating in itself is not enough if the features you're spending time on are not going to be a big success. That's why you still need to keep copying successful features from competitors. They've already done most of the hard work.

I think most people still prefer tabs to their "clever" image

Tabs is web browsers are evidence of some fundamental brokenness with the web. I think Microsoft's designers probably instinctively hated the idea, just like Apple's probably did (Safari didn't (doesn't?) have tabs turned on by default).

It's far from clear to me that most people are comfortable with the concept of dynamically managed tabs. Clearly computer nerds do like them though.

Lets not forget that one of the secrets to building successful software is the principle of "good enough for now, we'll make it better later."

I have used this feature exactly one time since they introduced it. For me, this decision was not surprising at all.

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