Should you build what customers ask for, or build what they don't know they need?
Experts
Talk to customers obsessively. Build what they need. Customer feedback is your roadmap.
Customers don't know what they want until you show them. Build from conviction, not surveys.
Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead)
In fact, we can measure at Stripe the usage of our dashboards by team, and so we can see which teams are themselves looking at their own metrics and that is an incredibly useful predictor of how on the same page they are and how customer obsessed they are.
Why experts writing AI evals is creating the fastest-growing companies in history | Brendan Foody
What makes Enterpret unique is its ability to build and update a customer-specific knowledge graph that provides the most granular and accurate categorization of all customer feedback and connects that customer feedback to critical metrics like revenue and CSAT.
Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Chris Miller
Chris Miller Talk to customers, and we also learned a lot from talking to people who we wanted to be customers but were not, right? And people who had either broken up with our product or evaluated it and never fell in love with it in the first place.
Chris Miller There's a lot in there. I can speak to the things that have resonated most deeply with me in my time there. The first is legitimate customer obsession. It's not marketing, it's legitimate, right? I've witnessed fierce and passionate debates internally that the root of what the people in the debate were really trying to unpack was what ...
Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google)
And one of the things I try to say frequently within the walls of Nubank is we are not going to take a small problem and scale it because if we do that, we end up with a big mess. Something isn't working at small scale, no problem, especially if we have a strong hypothesis and a lot of ways of getting good customer feedback.
The UX Research reckoning is here | Judd Antin (Airbnb, Meta)
The best researchers I think are first of all, multi method. The first iteration of user research was primarily a qualitative discipline. But a strong opinion that I have is that is largely one of those models that needs to evolve. It's not that qualitative user research is no longer important. It's that the best researchers have five tools.
User-centered performance is a term I made up, because it's fun to make up terms. And it refers to customer obsession or a user-centered practice that is symbolic rather than focused on learning. So it's hugely common, I would argue.
The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay
What makes Enterpret unique is its ability to build and update a customer-specific knowledge graph that provides the most granular and accurate categorization of all customer feedback, and connects that customer feedback to critical metrics like Revenue and CSAT.
If modernizing your voice of customer program to a generational upgrade is a 2025 priority, like customer-centric industry leaders like Canva, Notion, Perplexity, and Linear, reach out to the team at interpret.com/Lenny. That's E-N-T-E-R-P-R-E-T dot com slash Lenny.
The 10 traits of great PMs, AI, and Slack’s approach to product | Noah Weiss (Slack, Google)
I think what we would wind up doing with Stewart at Slack, for example, is we would get the entire development team, engineers design product, user research and Stewart together in a room and we almost do a bug bash together. The idea was like, "We're doing it all together.
Yeah. I mean each of those is an interesting mini lesson learned about those. I think the through line for all of them I would say is still the max that we have in trailing, which is we're customer obsessed but competitor aware. I think it's a little bit different. I think some companies are like ...
An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma)
And I think the most crazy version of it, maybe, is Dylan's always reading customer feedback. In fact, has reads the most customer feedback of all of us and has been doing that for a decade. And oftentimes, there used to be this thing where he would drop in tweets that he sees into different Slack channels to be like, hey, this seems concerning, or...
But it's one of those things where that's how much Dylan cares. And on one level it's just easy to say, "Hey, this is a single user who just happens to be using your product," and be dismissive with it or not care that deeply because you think you already know all the biggest problems, but that's not his attitude.
Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology)
I wrote an article, God, five or 10 years ago. God, I can't even remember how many years ago now. It was like Top Misconceptions About Lean Startup, and it was like, "Number one, lean means cheap, so if you're doing Lean Startup, it means you're not raising money." And it's like, "That's not true." And then kind of I remember what they are...
Usually, there's some critical insight or element of the first thing that is carried over into the second thing. And if you were there, if you know the story, you'll be like oh, wow, that makes sense in retrospect. And again, I think this cuts against our whole idea. The thing we think it's like to be a visionary is you just ...
Making time for what matters | Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (Authors of Make Time, Character VC)
And so what the teams will do is to plot these options on these lenses. They'll almost always create some lenses of their own, some custom lenses that matter to them. They might have one about their conviction. I think there's sort of a humorous one for Mellow where it's like, which founder is like, "F yeah, that's exactly what I want to build.
Jake Knapp Yeah, so here it is. And you can see that Marie is more likely to swear than Ben apparently. But it's crucial, right? And many founders, they'll have different ... one of the challenges is that for each founder, I think, each set of founders, there's maybe a different way that they phrase what that means. What conviction means to them.
Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG)
Especially if you want to do something dramatically different. Really, I think the biggest service for people who are starting out a little earlier is that point around bringing the recommendation, really having the opinion and standing behind it with conviction and doing what they need to do to build that conviction for themselves.
I think I got that same feedback quite a lot, actually, of needing to think bigger and be more visionary, etc. And I still do, frankly, actually, there's moments where I retrench way too far into execution and worry a little less about long-term strategy. So it's definitely my bias still.
35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest and beyond | Bob Baxley
Then maybe the third lesson is ideas need champions. They need champions willing to put themselves on the line for them. If you believe in something and you've made your case and you can really make your case, have the courage of your convictions and get behind it and fight as hard as you can for it.
Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more | Dalton Caldwell (YC)
I think in the case of Stripe, I don't want to tell Patrick's story for him, but I recall him saying at some point he wasn't as sure that Stripe was going to work until they were a year or two in. And then once it started working and then they really believed in it. But it wasn't like he woke up one day and like, "Stripe is the thing.
Build it once you have some conviction and then you're like, "Oh, I think I would have a customer. I think that at least one person would use this thing I want to build. At least one.
How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw
Same thing with ADHD. And you could extend it to autism and ton of other things as well. But when you're dyslexic, you're thinking spatially, you're thinking big, you're thinking visually, you're not... Yes, you mix up letters or you're struggling with big blocks of text; that's fine.
Behind the founder | Drew Houston (Dropbox)
When Steve Jobs was on stage in 2011 announcing iCloud, calling out Dropbox by name as something that will be viewed as archaic. And similarly, we always felt like we were in the shadow of the hammer of Google launching Google Drive, which had been rumored long before we even started the company.
And I felt like I had done that. That's a big part of the problem that led to a lot of this chaos at the end of chapter two, where I was like, oh, man, I'm on this treadmill. I'm doing stuff, but I'm clearly not setting the right direction. Or people are confused or it's not working, and I was too distant from the product.
Dylan Field live at Figma's Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design
A few of them made it to FigJam and have became I think very definitional. For example, Cursor Chat came out that day. I think it overall showed the entire team how fast we can move if we've got the right goal defined.
There's some point where Steve Jobs declared Flash dead and then went Skeuomorphic, Swiss minimalist, and then we're stuck there. I think we're going to swing back to being way more expressive, and Draw is part of that story.
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Henry Ford's quote about faster horses is overused. Most of us aren't building the iPhone. Listen to your customers.