Extract from Doug Austin’s “When It Comes to Delivering What the Customer Wants, Quality is Jobs 1: eDiscovery Best Practices”
You may think that title contains a typo, but it’s intentional. If you’re an eDiscovery software provider, you might think that if you keep track of what customers are asking for and you’re delivering many of those, you’re doing a great job. Actually, it’s possible that nothing could be further from the truth – basing your product enhancement philosophies on listening to your customers could be holding you back.
An Inc. article (This Was Steve Jobs’ Most Controversial Legacy. It Was Also His Most Brilliant, written by Jason Aten), discusses how one of the more well-known legacies about Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is his assertion that, contrary to popular belief, the customer isn’t always right. Over the years, Jobs shared the sentiment in a variety of different ways, though the idea was similar–that many times, customers have no idea what they’re talking about.
That’s not meant to insult the customer, it’s just that if the thing you’re building is new or unfamiliar, there’s a pretty good chance your customer will have no idea what they want. They may even have no idea that they even want it at all.
