Most people will read this title as, "Build what your customers tell you to build." The key here is that most customers will be happy to tell you they want all kinds of features and the best/only solution or feature looks like X. You have to go deeper. You have to listen to understand what they actually need.

I hate being that guy that trots out a quote from a historic figure, but c'mon, this is a slam dunk:

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

Which is what they got, from a certain point of view.

> I hate being that guy that trots out a quote from a historic figure...

Don't worry, it was a made up quote. You're safe.

1) I can't believe I missed the "trot out" pun in my original comment.

2) Anyone who's interested to read more on this made-up quote should see this HBR article:

https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast

Boom shakalaka! Perfect quote.

Yup. To be blunt, customers often don't know what they need. Often they don't even know what their real problems are.

But they know what their pain points are, and a good BA or Product Manager/Owner will know how to dig into those pain points and unearth the real problems that need solving, and how best to go about solving them.

Great example of this is from a music software from Propellerheads. Everyone was complained about the bulky, sluggish file browser. It stayed like that for a few versions, but then they reinvented the whole file browsing experience instead of doing the easy solution of just making it simply faster.

Couldn't agree more. Very very well said.

Sometimes there can be value in doing rapid shallow MVP type iteration with key customers, but there should ideally be a step between that and stuff going into the mainline product where somebody thinks.