Should you actually ask customers what they want?

Yes. But I think we sometimes ask customers to do the wrong job.

I love customer research. I will bang on forever about businesses needing to spend more time with the people they’re supposedly serving. But there is a version of customer-centricity that seems to mean asking people what you should build and then doing whatever gets the most votes.

I don’t really believe in that.

If you’d asked me years ago what I wanted from my phone, I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t have described half the things I now consider essential. That isn’t because I’m stupid. I just don’t spend my day imagining technically possible solutions to problems I have half accepted as normal.

What I can tell you about is my life.

I can tell you what annoys me. What I’m trying to achieve. What I’ve cobbled together to make something work. What feels embarrassing. What takes too long. What I wish I didn’t have to think about. What I currently tolerate because I don’t know there is another option.

That is incredibly valuable information.

The job of the business is to listen to all of that and interpret it.

I think there is a big difference between asking customers for the answer and understanding customers well enough to see an answer.

The latter requires more judgement. You have to notice contradictions. Join dots. Look at what people do as well as what they say. Combine what customers need with what is changing culturally and what the business can actually do unusually well.

Customer-led shouldn’t mean handing over responsibility for innovation.

It means being curious enough about people that you don’t build the future entirely from inside your own head.