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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

Advice like this is fantastic, but I hate when it's positioned as the one-true-way to do product development.

Consider some of the greatest inventions of all time: the printing press, the telephone, the airplane, the Internet, and the web. Considering the notion that they would have been conceived of this way is absurd, so clearly there's more than one way to make something people want.

Mix in the fact that contrarians often disrupt things the most, and when you see a process like this that itself has become considered the consensus approach, it seems like a high point of potential leverage to just try a different method, especially if that one has also been proven to work or is more in tune with your own talents, experience, and intuition.

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I don’t see why those things couldn’t have been invented by this process?

The article specifically states that you focus on your potential customer’s problems, not the solutions they want or would use. Ie, you’re not asking if they want a better horse, but you are asking what sucks about the one they have today.

From there better shoes, saddles, or even a car/plane can come out of that discussion.

I don't think the kinds of 'problems' people may have articulated that these things solve would have been revelatory enough to argue they fit into this process. At best, the problems would have been so general like "I am uneducated about the world" or "it takes a long time to travel between places" that they are effectively immaterial when it comes to the process that led to these innovations.

For example, if someone told you today "I don't like that I am going to die one day", would you be able to iterate your way via customer development to stop death? Would the fact that people don't want to die be incorporated in the understanding of the process that led to any solution that gets created? No. Some problems are either so obvious or so non-obvious that the spark of insight that leads to solutions is barely influenced by the articulation of the problem or lack thereof by those who are suffering under it, often completely oblivious of it.

Thanks, I agree that the default path of "be like Steve Jobs" is a trap that I've fallen into enough times to realize that there are more ways to build where you don't have to have the insights up front.

The key in my opinion is to be able to identify market opportunities and problems to solve, then be REALLY flexible about how you go about solving them b/c your first product solution ideas are very unlikely to work.

I agree this is definitely a great way to solve problems, it's one of hill climbing basically, where the tactics and strategy really need to be carefully managed since it's very easy to get the gradient or step size wrong.

Another way to see it is it's a form of de-risking an already risky endeavor. Anytime you reduce risk by adopting a methodology or formula that has known benefits, you're basically trading options (in the financial markets sense.) In this case, you're (probably) reducing downside risk, while increasing the odds of success, but at a cost of reducing the overall maximum upside, since your odds of creating a once-in-a-generation disruption goes down if you're using a hill climbing methodology to create wealth.

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