Customer hitchhiking

Oh, the customers want the page to be colorful. Let's make it colorful.

It's a disease.

Customer hitchhiking is following whatever the customers want. It's a lousy way to build a product. Oh, the customers want the page to be colorful. Let's make it colorful. Do they want a calendar feature? Sure, let's build a calendar.

It’s a common misconception people have about customer-centric.

In 1998, Apple removed the floppy disk drive on iMac. They used something new called USB. The customers thought Apple was crazy because everyone used floppy disks then. But this courage to make the technical decision is essential in innovation. Apple removed the floppy disk because they believed it was no longer relevant.

Apple has a point of view on the way they build products. With this point of view, we are being very clear about what kind of people should use them and how they're supposed to use them.

This is where intuition is useful. Without any point of view, we'll build mediocre products. We create a bunch of unrelated features in one product. We'll obsess with competitors or we customer hitchhiking.

A simple way to form your intuition is by using the feature strategy map.

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