Ryan Shank of PhoneWag explains why chasing individual customer requests derails product strategy. You need patterns across many customers, not one person's idea. PhoneWag aggregates feedback, finds common themes, and stack-ranks requests to keep the roadmap focused on what actually matters.
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What up guys, it's Ryan Shank from PhoneWag and here we are, day 23 of our morning updates. Today, blue bottle coffee, here we go. Sun hasn't even come up yet, it's gorgeous. It's not gorgeous, it's actually freezing outside and it's snowing or it snowed yesterday. But what we're going to do today is it's going to be a quick one. What we're going to talk about is the trap of listening to customers too much when you're getting customer feedback and not zooming out a bit, taking— one, you want to get enough data under your belt so that it's a significant sample size. You don't want to just kind of piecemeal, "Hey, this, this," and then let that shape your product direction. I read a quote today, it was from Henry Ford, that it was like— and the quote was, "If I listened to my customers, then I would have just made a faster horse and buggy," versus building a car. And I think that's pretty interesting and it's very relevant to what's happening with me and PhoneWagon in particular is that we're getting a lot of feedback from, I guess you can call them leads, right? People that are inquiring about the software where they need it to do certain things. We are starting to aggregate a lot of the commonalities and of course there's features that are 100% they make sense and they're must-haves and they're gonna happen and they're on the roadmap. But then there's things that are a bit out of scope and I can see how founders or owners of companies companies can fall into the trap of, you know, wanting to just win that customer so badly that they'll go out of their way and build something that doesn't make sense for the overall direction of the product, okay? So it's really important to aggregate all this feedback, start to stack-rank it, and then shape the product based on the things that are most commonly requested and things like that. So that's it. That's what we're doing. Quick update today. But I hope you guys have an amazing Wednesday, and we will be back tomorrow for Day 24 of our morning updates. Thanks, guys.
