The “people don’t buy a quarter inch drill, they buy a quarter inch hole” thing is a catchy phrase, but it isn't always true. Or even a useful way to think. I

The “people don’t buy a quarter inch drill, they buy a quarter inch hole” thing is a catchy phrase, but it isn't always true. Or even a useful way to think. It is a very limiting way of looking at products. The reason it isn't always true is that sometimes focusing on what you think the customer wants leads to lost opportunities. It reminds me of a Neal Stephenson quote from Zodiac: "Most of my colleagues go on backpacking trips when they have to do some thinking. I go to a good hardware store and head for the oiliest, dustiest corners. … If they're really good, they don't hassle me. They let me wander around and think. Young hardware clerks have a lot of hubris. They think they can help you find anything…. Old hardware clerks have learned the hard way that nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another." If you build stuff you will sooner or later realize that when tools that can do new tricks turn up, it provides you with new opportunities that perhaps you didn't think of before. If you own equipment to make holes you know that there is a vast difference between a spade bit and a forstner bit. They are two very fundamentally different ways of making a hole. Both make holes, but one will make an absolute mess of certain materials. If all you have is a spade bit, then for some tasks, you have to come up with a different strategies for achieving what you want. You have to design yourself around the limitation. If you use a forstner bit, its ability to make clean holes may mean that not only can you use it for making holes - you may be able to use it in situations where you are not primarily making a hole, but removing a curved bit of material. I want a faster dishwasher because a faster dishwasher would solve actual problems for me. But it is a bit more nuanced than that. My dishwasher spends about an hour on one load. Getting it down to 50 minutes or even 40 wouldn't change anything. But if you can get it down to 10-15 minutes, it really starts to matter. It means the way I sequence tasks in the kitchen can change. And that's for everyday use. If I were to have a dinner with a lot of guests it would also mean that I'd need fewer plates because I can wash plates between courses. I've been to a few design thinking workshops, and the thing that always gets me is how arrogantly stupid a lot of these workshops end up being. They pretend to be about learning the customer's needs rapidly, but more often than not what happens is that people try to replace actual insight with ceremonies and suppositions only to arrive at either the wrong conclusions or be in such a hurry to demonstrate cleverness that you miss most opportunities. But hey, there is good money in teaching ceremony.