““What does it matter what the customer thinks? They already bought the product.” Astoundingly, the CTO did not fire him on the spot, and instead just moved on, ignoring the comment entirely.”
The author lost a lot of credibility to me when I read that part, because it’s often critical for the life and success of a product to be skeptical of customer requests or feedback, especially bespoke custom work requests that come up all the time in enterprise sales. Your company wants to grow and needs the revenue, but accepting custom requests takes you off-strategy and often wastes resources on things that won’t generate value beyond one isolated sale / renewal.
The Recurly founder had a great quote about this, related to why Dropbox succeeded (by ignoring feature requests from customers and imposing their own vision if a simple interface, and only adding features later). It’s discussed here: < https://zurb.com/blog/don-t-add-features-to-make-customers-h... >.
Anyway, this author’s rants actually strike me like someone who doesn’t have a good sense about product design or product management.
The author lost a lot of credibility to me when I read that part, because it’s often critical for the life and success of a product to be skeptical of customer requests or feedback, especially bespoke custom work requests that come up all the time in enterprise sales. Your company wants to grow and needs the revenue, but accepting custom requests takes you off-strategy and often wastes resources on things that won’t generate value beyond one isolated sale / renewal.
The Recurly founder had a great quote about this, related to why Dropbox succeeded (by ignoring feature requests from customers and imposing their own vision if a simple interface, and only adding features later). It’s discussed here: < https://zurb.com/blog/don-t-add-features-to-make-customers-h... >.
Anyway, this author’s rants actually strike me like someone who doesn’t have a good sense about product design or product management.