What Customers Want (Except When They Don't)

It’s a well known bromide of user research: customers don’t always know what they want - even when they think they do. Just because they can articulate it explicitly and provide detailed use cases, is no guarantee that once they get the thing they’ve asked for and desired, that they will in fact want it.

This is especially problematic for products that rely on ongoing usage and revenue (e.g. through recurring fees or advertising), and sell the up-front product for little or no cost as a loss-leading carrot. Inability to sustain interest after the initial value has been sated is the nightmare scenario for products like this - which include virtually all mobile apps that want to be actual money makers.

Bryce Roberts offers a cautionary tale of his own making:

For years I told anyone that would listen how much I wanted an app that let me snap a picture of my meal and would tell me how many calories were on the plate….

So when Meal Snap was announced last year, I was thrilled.

I quickly paid my $2.99 and downloaded the app before heading out to breakfast with the kids. I decided to take it for a spin and snapped this picture to test it out. The app worked as advertised and within a few minutes of uploading the image, I got the results back….

And I never opened the app again. 

Here was an app that I was so vocal about wanting, nay, needing. Yet when I actually had exactly what I’d been wishing for, I found it didn’t do much for me.

What turned this seemingly great app into one that he just used once? “Turns out I’d developed a good enough sense for calorie counting that my estimates were just as accurate if not more so than the magical app of my dreams.”

This is obviously a one-off, anecdotal case, but it reinforces the caution we have to use when listening to customer input. Things that seem intuitively right and useful at first can turn out to be just the opposite, as Bryce’s example shows.

This is why I’m sanguine about Clayton Christensen’s “jobs to be done” approach — fundamentally it’s a good concept, but it doesn’t get close to the level of predictability that is sometimes ascribed to it. There are many nuances about how to interpret a given a job, and whether you can actually build a business off a job even if there appears to be demand for it (there are lots of jobs to be done that don’t get addressed for financial reasons — just ask anyone suffering from an obscure disease that won’t get a hit drug like Lipator).

With present day research and analysis methods, there remains an irreducable amount of uncertainty about new product success, even when customers have told us loud and clear what they want.

Google's Future

John Batelle has some interesting thoughts up about how Google is going to continue to thrive. Is it reaching a point where it is just not going to continue to attract and retain the very best talent? Commenting on Tim Armstrong’s departure to head up AOL he writes:

But Tim’s leaving Google strikes me as yet another signal of how much Google as a company has changed. Good people, whether engineers or top executives, are leaving the company to do other things, regardless of how wonderful the place is, how wealthy it made them, or how hard the company strives to create a culture that encourages retention.

I’ve had several discussions with folks who’ve left Google lately. Here’s a direct quote from one of them, who is starting a new search related company:“It’s very hard to take risks at Google.”

Batelle goes on to compare Google’s situation with Microsoft some 15 years ago since, like Microsoft, Google is heavily focused on its one cash-cow.

Coincidentally, on the heals of the Google Voice announcement last week, I ran across this article at TechCrunch from July of last year about how Google causes acquired companies to dramatically slow down, stall, perhaps die entirely. Google Voice was acquired as Grand Central, which then went into closed status (no new members) for over a year and a half. This is not unusual at Google, as the article describes:

In Febuary of this year Google re-launched JotSpot as Google Sites. Google had acquired Jotspot some 16 months earlier, during which time Jot was only available to existing customers and closed to new signups. What happened during those 16 months and why did the process of integrating with Google take so long? Looking through the list of companies that Google has acquired, Jotspot would be considered lucky as many others have died, stalled or lost out to competitors because of the acquisition process.

Google has a proprietary technology stack that was originally developed for massive-scale search, but which makes it challenging to integrate in new disparate products. New-hires also have to come up to speed on it, which takes time, and on the flip side, someone leaving Google after a few years does not have the immediate experience in more common platforms that other employers would seek. For the time being that shouldn’t be a barrier to hiring an ex-Googler, but in the future it could well be.

As smart as Google is, they are not immune from some of the organizational and strategic problems that plague much older companies in “traditional” businesses.