You’ve probably heard the apocryphal Henry Ford quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Whether Ford actually said it or not (historians say probably not), it still resonates with me.

Customers tell us what they want–faster horses–but what they actually need is better, faster transportation.

I’ve watched teams build exactly what customers asked for, only to have those same customers barely use it. The disconnect isn’t that customers don’t know what they wanted, it’s that they stopped asking why. They took the surface answer and ran with it.

I wrote about the relentless power of asking why earlier. There’s more depth there if you want to dig into the technique.

What’s on your roadmap right now that solves the stated want instead of the underlying need?