Ask any Product Manager you know, how important is market research for a product development process, almost unanimously they would answer very important. You can even say, without the validation from research and user feedback, any product we try to develop would quickly lose its relevancy. Everything hinges on market research, from the type of product we should develop, the core features that need to be present, the product’s positioning, and so on.
Notice i used the word ‘almost’ in ‘almost unanimously’ didn’t i? There is always a slight chance that there exists a few rebellious-anti-mainstream Product Managers who has differing opinions. And most likely, their role model is none other than the famous car industry legend, Henry Ford.
As the legend has it, Henry Ford famously said that if during his time he asked his customers what kind of new product they want, they would likely to answer, ‘a faster horse’. And that little anecdote in my opinion had a profound impact on how people view the innovation side of product management. In this light, listening to customer’s feedback is seen as playing it safe, not being bold, not taking any chances or treading new waters. It also paints this image of innovators who boldly disregard market feedback and build a new product based on their vision. Products that are not only new, but sometimes create a whole new category on its own. Products like the first Walkman, the iPhone, or Netflix. And the creators of such products are hailed as the rock stars of business, their names forever engraved in the innovation Hall of Fame.
Well the facts of those products’ success speak for themselves, there’s no denying that. But does that mean that all market research is futile, and if success follows charismatic figures with transcending-vision for their products, what possible chance then, do the rest of us, mortal Product Managers have?
I’m here to tell you that the realities are most likely to be a lot more mundane than what the legends have us believe. No, i don’t have all the facts but i can share with you one crucial information and one piece of explanation that may lift the mystery. And, yes, there are plenty of hope for the rest of us.
First of all, the anecdote is a myth. Henry Ford has never actually said those things about faster horse. Some people on the internet had done the research and found no historical evidence proving Henry Ford gave that statement.
In fact what Henry Ford did say in his autobiography “My Life and Work”, seems to suggest otherwise:
“I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one — and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.”
-My Life and Work (1922) Ch. 4 p.73-
From that quote, we can infer that Henry Ford did care about the customer and tried to build his cars to fit with the largest part possible of the society. He mentioned his goal to build ‘a car for the great multitude’ and then he specifies it further in terms of size, material, design, and ultimately price.
Of course, dispelling the myth about Henry Ford’s quote does not automatically mean that the ‘disregard your customer’ approach is wrong. Although the historical accuracy of the anecdote has been proven wrong, nevertheless the school of thought persists, and people might point out to other equally famous legendary titan of industry, Steve Jobs who believed in building great products you can’t always rely on market research to guide you on what to build.
But in my opinion, that statement is also at best misunderstood and at worst misinterpreted.
You see, people seems to like dividing things into simple categories, the less subdivision the better. That way, it’s easier to distinguish who from who. That’s why you have such axiomatic divisions as good and evil, west and east, yin and yang and so on.
Of course, the reality is much more messier than that. We live in a world full of gradients, nuances and shades. In our effort to simplify the world around us, we have to be mindful of the trap of oversimplification which will make us miss the point altogether.
In this case, the trap is to think that the approach to innovation in product development is binary. Either you don’t have any ideas and has to rely on what the customers tell you or you absolutely listen to your gut instinct and inspiration alone.
In the case of Steve Jobs for example, while there is probably a number of online evidence proving that Steve Jobs did not rely on market research, there is no evidence proving that he never performed market research. In fact in his 1997 Q&A after he just returned to Apple, he famously admitted that he was wrong for not being customer-centric. And in later talks and interviews you could find lots of examples of him touting the importance of listening to the market or the customers.
Now we come to the core issue: how to best reconcile between the two approach in product management? Well the answer is really simple: find the balance point. The solution to any polar opposite is almost always to find the balance point. And please note here that the balance point does not necessarily has to be in the middle (remember that the world is messy?). Here are two insights for any Product Manager who is looking for that balance point.
1. If i haven’t made it abundantly clear already by this point, yes customer feedback is important. Yes, market research is important. To build a great product, the focus must be on the consumer. That’s why it’s important to have standard research approach like focus groups, surveys, usage analysis, etc. What should be noted is that the feedback from the customers are subject to bias (both from the customer’s side and from the researcher’s side). And sure, customers may not be able to communicate or really know what they want, but they always has needs. So the job of the Product Manager is to dig deep enough through the biases to uncover those needs.
2. Only after we know what the real needs are, we can then work on building the solution for that needs. And here is where the innovation comes to play. ‘Innovation’ is such a big word and comes with vague definitions that makes it hard to really pin down what it’s all about. It’s kind of like the word ‘creativity’. Well to innovate usually means to use some creativity in building a product. And what is creativity but simply new combinations of existing ideas? Walkman is a cassette player combined with portability design, iphone is what happens when we try to interact with our phones without any physical button, and Netflix at its most fundamental idea is probably what happen when you turn a video rental service into fully digital. So to be creative, you simply need to familiarise yourself with as many differing ideas and concepts as possible then make it a habit to imagine the possible combinations of those various ideas.
By tweaking those 2 principles, we can derive almost countless permutations of product management approach. One Product Manager may use the gut instinct approach first and run the prototype on the public to see their reactions. The other might rely more heavily on user feedback in each step of the development process, resulting in a more strict but reliable approach. You can use different models of workflow to come up with ideas for your product. You can even incorporate the customers in idea generation process, asking them to throw lots of random ideas at you and see which one sticks.
The choice is yours.