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Comment by ssharp | Hacker News Reader

"And, one of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards..."

This is such a common idea in business strategy that I have a hard time believing that most large companies don't, at least at the top, understand it. However, it also seems like a principal that is very hard to stay focused on as a product or service flows down throughout the company. There has to be a very good reason why this strategy flows through Apple's veins, yet gets lost in the mix of many of its competitors.

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This is not an easy thing to do. Customers sometimes don't know what they want or how to articulate it.

If you keep having focus groups with customers and continually implement what they ask for you might end up with something like MS Office where you have a kludge of actions buried within and across multiple menu items.

As a contrast to that look at Windows Phone 7. If you've ever used it it's rather elegant. I feel that they looked beyond the "comments box" and dug deeper. It truly feels like they made sure the devices it runs on are communication devices (making calls and texting) first and layered in modern smartphone functionality (applications and cloud storage).

Working backwards from the customer isn't necessarily giving the customer what they're asking you for, but defining a product which will, in fact make something easier, more fun, or scratch an itch to the extent that they will give you money and convince their friends to do the same.

Exactly. Customer outcomes don't have to be described or defined directly by the customer.

And you have that famous quote from Henry Ford that may or may not have been spoken by him:

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/08/henry_ford_never_said_the_fa...

I think you're mistaking "customer desires" and "customer experience". What Jobs is referring to is, what does the customer need, not what they want.

This requires far more than polling users and focus studies. It requires a deep conceptual understanding of what drives your target market (often not your current customers!) and how to get there.

Understanding the Kano model allows you to focus on the "right" features: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Kano_model

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