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Comment by allenleee | Hacker News Reader

I believe this approach will lead you to very incremental solutions.

It lowers the cost of failure (downside), but also the potential impact of success (upside). This approach determines your mindset as a product designer and destroys your potential product/business upside upfront. Most users get pitched "understandable ideas" because builders think they have to prove market fit before building product depth.

The most successful companies don't discover markets, they create them. Most visionaries forge the macro (10x) jump and then ask customers for the micro improvements. The meaningful, big-leap innovations are often not obvious from the start: If you're creating something that will be a great company 10 years from now, most people will probably not get it at first.

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> 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.

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.

That's the exact idea behind Agile. Sure it may limit some impact of success, but I bet you way more people are blowing millions of dollars trying to pull big products out of their hat.

And for the record the number of "visionaries" is incredibly small, and pretty much everyone I've ever met that considered themselves a "visionary" is a con artist that talks a good game, has the technical acumen of day old mayonnaise and excuses being a colossal a-hole because Steve Jobs did it that way.

EDIT: Further I am realizing your talk about creating markets isn't so true either.

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, none of these companies were really visionary, and they are the biggest names around.

The pioneers get all the arrows.

If your goal is to maximize profit and marketshare, you don't want to be the first to do a thing. You want to be the second or third. That's where the money is.

Being a pioneer, though, is far more enjoyable.

To be fair, a lot of software development is for inhouse, sometimes specialized, things. The tech side being the visionary there is potentially quite difficult without specialized knowledge (e.g., via some hybrid roles as seen in some industries).

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