Transcript excerpt of Aaron Levie (Box) advising product teams to engage deeply with early-adopter, futuristic customers (the top ~5–10% of the adoption curve). He recommends listening to their observed problems and desired outcomes, but not verbatim feature requests; instead, translate insights into solutions that advance the product’s long-term vision and avoid becoming an amalgam of disparate customer feature demands.
Chapters
Okay, next one. Spend time, a lot of time, with your sort of futuristic customers, but don't exactly just build what they're asking for. You always have a bell curve of customers of how innovative or how leaning into the future they are versus how conservative they are. It's the customers that are at the first sort of 5 to 10% of that bell curve. They're at the bleeding edge of everything. These are the people that they wait in line and they get the AirPods, and they have an Amazon Alexa at their desk in their office. These are the customers that you want to spend a lot of time with, because they're going to see things, even before you will, about how your technology could be used in their environment. They're going to spot trends of what's happening in their employee base and how they want to push your technology farther than you even would have imagined would have been possible. The amount of innovation that we've been able to drive because of what we've heard from those customers is probably a significant percentage of what we've ended up building. But the difference is from legacy enterprise software companies to today is back in the day, what you would do is you would just ask them, what do you want us to build? And then you'd go build those things, because that would essentially lead to a sale or an upsell. What you need to do is listen to what are the issues that they're seeing, what are the things they wish your product could do, Then either work with them or come back with solutions that maybe aren't exactly what they asked for, maybe aren't the specific features that they asked for, but are going to eventually get them down the path that really they're trying to push your product in. So we spend a lot of time listening to customers, but not building exactly what they asked for. Because when you just build what a customer asks for, essentially you become this sort of amalgamation of feature requests from every single one of your customers. And there's no way that you're going to then be able to keep a consistent North Star with your product. You're going to be pulled in lots of different directions by lots of different customers. But the software vendors that do it really wrong is by not listening at all to those early adopters. They start focusing on the most conservative companies. They start focusing on the. The people that will only adopt if they build all of the features that they ask for. That's really how you go wrong in enterprise software, because then you really lose sight of your vision and ultimately what you're trying to build.
