Henry Ford's Customers Didn't Want A Faster Horse
“If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.”
We have all heard Henry Ford’s famous quote many times before and it serves as a battle cry to many a visionary entrepreneur who swears against asking customers what they want.
Steve Jobs had a reputation for, amongst other things, his stance against customer input. “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”.
Granted, many people didn’t know they wanted an iPad until Apple showed them and focus groups are frought with inherent weakness. There is often a gap between what focus group participants say and do, small samples can’t be generalised, participants have varying motivations, introverts lose their voice and group leaders can influence the direction of discussions.
Few are blessed with the vision of Steve Jobs and most entrepreneurs must instead rely on the ability to identify problems and find cheap and quick ways to test and iterate on the underlying assumptions in order to get to product market fit before the well runs dry.
It is these teachings, popularized by lean startup protagonists Steve Blank and Eric Ries, that the entrepreneurs of today have come to swear by. These entrepreneurs don’t start off with a grand vision. Oftentimes they start off with what they think is a problem and what they think a solution to that problem might be and iterate from there.
So, back to those faster horses. What did it really mean if customers had said that they wanted faster horses?
While it is easy to interpret this quote as a reason to never speak to your customers or target market again (!), closer inspection reveals something a lot more profound, particularly for innovators and product managers.
Ultimately, Henry Ford did give his customers exactly what they wanted.
What purpose would a faster horse have served? Faster transportation. That is essentially what they were crying out for.
The underlying message was that they wanted a faster method of getting from A to B in order to spend more time doing other things popular in the 1900s such aswatching baseball, football and playing games (evidently, the more things change the more they stay the same).
Faster transportation was essentially their ‘job to be done’ and getting to this answer might have been as simple as asking why they wanted a faster horse.
Knowing what the underlying problem and need is gives entrepreneurs a much higher chance of success in developing a solution that fills that need. It sounds simple but given that more than 90% of startups fail, perhaps the concept isn’t widely acknowledged, understood or adopted.
Decorated innovation academic Clayton Christensen has argued that both people and customers have ‘jobs’ that arise regularly and need to get done. Furthermore, marketing professor Theodore Levitt is quoted as saying “people don’t want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole.”
Essentially, when developing products you should ask your customers what they want and use that as a starting point to discover the underlying pain points and jobs to be done. Don’t build the product the customer wants, build the solution to their underlying problem, something that helps them get their job done.
The Innovator’s Method by academics Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer outlines tools and techniques to integrate lean startup, design thinking and agile into the large and often slow moving, large wasting enterprise.
Furr and Dyer also remind us that these ‘jobs to be done’ can be functional, social, emotional or a combination thereof.
A Gucci handbag, while serving some functional purpose, is more about social status and feeling good than it is about having somewhere to keep your purse and car keys.
1. Question, Observe, Network and Experiment
According to The Innovator’s Method, we must first question, observe, network and experiment in order to identify some potential problems.
Engage and think broadly.
Too many corporate executives suffer from a lack of curiosity, read far too littleand have limited interests outside of their direct responsibilities.
Ask questions of customers, co-workers, suppliers, partners, family, friends and so on. Ask open-ended questions. Ask why.
Network aggressively with people from inside and outside your industry. Read lots of different blogs and magazines. Step outside of the realm of familiarity and get interested in lots of different subject matter.
Being able to think laterally and draw examples from one industry that can be applied in another, often lends itself to innovation.
These tools will put you in a position to better identify potential problems to be solved.
2. Painstorming
Painstorming, a concept outlined in The Innovator’s Method, is used to map the customer journey, identify pain points, root causes and assumptions underlying key problems.
Begin with your problem hypotheses using jobs to be done, perform root cause analysis and focus on key assumptions underlying the root causes.
Root Cause Analysis and The Five Whys
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The WorkFlow podcast is hosted by Steve Glaveski with a mission to help you unlock your potential to do more great work in far less time, whether you're working as part of a team or flying solo, and to set you up for a richer life.
To help you avoid stepping into these all too common pitfalls, we’ve reflected on our five years as an organization working on corporate innovation programs across the globe, and have prepared 100 DOs and DON’Ts.
