However, you rarely want to make the product customers ask for. If you asked customers what they wanted when Valve started, they would’ve said a better way to store CDs. Or for the iPhone, customers wanted a better physical keyboard (like BlackBerry), whereas Apple provided an on-screen keyboard to provide more screen real estate.

A good company should listen to what customers say, and then design products the customer didn’t expect that solves the problem even better. But rarely should you build what the customers claim to want.

The customer knows the problems they have, they don’t necessarily know what an effective solution looks like.