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I always cringe when I hear "don't listen to your customers." That is absolutely the wrong behavior. If you don't listen to the people who are going to buy your

I always cringe when I hear "don't listen to your customers." That is absolutely the wrong behavior. If you don't listen to the people who are going to buy your product, you won't build a product that solves a real problem. I listen to my stakeholders (potential users, potential buyers, current users, etc), but I don't necessarily do what they say. Most people try to give you a solution to their problem, you need to dig through their "solution" to find their actual "problem", then design the best solution (and like all design, it is best not when nothing else can be added to it, but rather when nothing else can be taken away). Oh, and I completely agree that software should be opinionated. People are paying you to solve their problem, don't get lazy and push responsibility back on them!

rimantas 16y ago
"don't listen to your customers" means doing exactly the way you describe it in the second paragraph. It does not mean "don't pay attention to what your customers are doing".
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  Except I've had conversations where people don't do that. I've also seen blogs that say "build what you want, if it's great it will sell." That is BS. It is very similar to the "Fail Fast" mantra. Yes, if you apply it correctly, you will build a better startup. If you apply it naively, you will do just that: fail quickly. "Don't listen to your customers" seems to resonate with engineers in a weird way. I think it is a combination of ego and anti-social behavior.