And If That Sentence Annoyed You, Keep Reading.
There’s a ritual in product management. You ship something. You set up customer calls. You sit through 30 minutes of someone politely telling you what they wish your product would do. You write it all down. You put it in a Notion doc with colour-coded tags. You call it “the voice of the customer.” You built exactly what they asked for.
And then nothing changes.
The product gets a little better. A new filter here, a toggle there. You hit the quarterly OKR. Everyone claps in the sprint review. And six months later, a competitor eats your lunch, not because they listened harder, but because they understood something your customers couldn’t articulate.
This is the trap. And the best product managers I’ve worked with don’t fall into it.
The Faster Horse Problem Never Actually Went Away
You’ve heard the Henry Ford quote. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Whether Ford actually said it is debatable. Whether it’s true is not.
Customers are good at describing their pain. They’re terrible at prescribing the cure. That’s not a criticism. It’s just how the human mind works.
Customers’ imagination is bound by what already exists. They can tell you the current thing is slow, or clunky, or expensive. What they can’t do is leap to a fundamentally different model. That leap is your job.
Ford didn’t ignore customers. He watched how people moved. He studied what frustrated them about distance and time. He paid attention to factory workflows and manufacturing costs. He synthesised all of that into a product nobody asked for, but everybody wanted: a car.
Steve Jobs and the Discipline of Ignoring Requests
Jobs was famously allergic to focus groups. There’s that 1998 Business Week interview where he said, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
Now, the lazy reading of that quote is “Steve Jobs was arrogant and didn’t care about users.” The smarter reading is that Jobs cared obsessively about users — he just didn’t outsource his thinking to them.
When Apple killed the floppy drive on the first iMac, people lost their minds. When they removed the headphone jack from the iPhone 7, the internet declared Apple was finished. When they launched the iPad, the consensus was that nobody needed a big iPod Touch.
Jobs didn’t have a crystal ball. What he had was a different way of processing a signal. He watched how people actually used technology when no one was looking. He studied adjacent industries — music, retail, and publishing and spotted convergence before anyone else.
He had a conviction that simplicity was a feature people couldn’t ask for because they’d been conditioned to expect complexity.
The Incremental Trap
Here’s what happens when a product team takes customer feedback too literally.
Q1: Customers say the onboarding flow is confusing. You simplify it. Good move.
Q2: Customers say they want a dark mode. You build dark mode. Fine.
Q3: Customers say the reporting dashboard needs more filters. You add filters. Sure.
Q4: You look up from your backlog and realise you’ve spent a year polishing furniture on a sinking ship.
The market had already shifted. A new entrant reimagined the category entirely. Your product is now the most well-polished version of something people are actively moving away from.
This is the incremental trap. You’re so close to the feedback that you can’t see the bigger picture. Every individual decision was reasonable, but the aggregate outcome was irrelevant.
The best PMs I know set a hard limit: maybe 30% of their roadmap can come from direct customer requests. The rest has to come from pattern recognition, tech debt removal, market research, competitive signals, technology shifts, and good old-fashioned opinion about where the world is heading.
The Dirty Secret About Customer Interviews
Most customer interviews are confirmation exercises. The PM has already decided what to build. The interview is there to generate a quote for the PRD. It sounds rigorous, it feels evidence-based, and half the time it’s just narrative laundering for a decision that’s already been made.
I’ve done this. You’ve probably done this. It’s not malicious. It’s human. We seek validation, not information. And when the entire product culture rewards “customer-centric thinking,” the easiest way to get your feature greenlit is to wave a stack of interview transcripts at a stakeholder and call it research.
Real research means a customer telling you they love your product, and your data proving they haven’t logged in for three weeks. It means hearing ten people ask for the same feature and having the conviction to say no because you see something they don’t.
Real research is not about getting better at asking questions — of yourself, of the data, of the market.
What the Great PMs Actually Do
If they’re not sitting in customer interviews all day, what are they doing?
They’re reading earnings calls from adjacent industries. They’re tracking what VCs are funding, not because VC wisdom is gospel, but because money flow reveals where smart people think the world is going.
They’re watching how Gen Z uses technology, because teenagers don’t carry the baggage of traditional workflows. Good PMs are also studying regulation changes, demographic shifts, and infrastructure build-outs, especially around AI.
They’re joining dots that don’t obviously belong together.
The PM who built the best feature I’ve ever seen in a Fintech product told me she got the idea by watching how Duolingo structures its learning streaks.
Nothing to do with banking. Everything to do with human behaviour around commitment and habit. Completely different domain, but exactly the right mental model.
Now, Allow Me to Flip This Whole Thing
I’ve spent thousand words arguing that the best PMs don’t talk to customers. And I believe every word of it. But only if we’re using the narrow, conventional definition of “talking to customers,” such as following an interview script.
If we expand the definition, the opposite is true. The best PMs never stop talking to customers. They’re just doing it differently.
They’re reading support tickets. They’re scanning Reddit forums, Twitter complaints, and App Store reviews. They’re sitting in on sales calls, not to hear the pitch, but to hear the objection.
They are involved in usability testing to understand where the friction points are. They’re building relationships with a handful of customers — not dozens — who are thoughtful and invested enough to push back honestly.
If you think this article is worth debating, let’s connect. The best conversations often start with disagreement.
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