Faster Horses: How to understand what your customers will buy

Holly Donohue

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“If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.” Henry Ford

A common mistake I see businesses make is leaving a customer meeting with a shopping list of features…and no insight into why they're needed. Because the ideas come straight from customers, they are often fast-tracked to the top of the roadmap, displacing previously agreed priorities. The product or feature is released with great fanfare, only for sales to be so dismal that they barely cover the cost of development. Frantic efforts follow to push traction through the sales and customer experience (CX) teams, but these rarely succeed. Before long, the feature is forgotten—pushed aside for the next customer request.

The danger of blindly following customer requests

The challenge is, customers will tell you the features they want, but that doesn't mean:

It’s a problem worth solving
It's the best way to solve the problem
They’d actually pay for it
It’s worth the cost of building
It will give you a competitive edge

Blindly following customer requests can lead to significant development costs spent on features that don’t deliver revenue - whether through direct sales, expansion or contribution to your overall value proposition. This is a major drain on resources and morale, as teams pour time and energy into initiatives that fail to deliver impact.

Building fast isn’t always the answer

Many CEOs, recognising this cycle, conclude that customer research is a time sink and opt to “build fast and see what sticks.”

Whilst speed is essential in product development, the most expensive way to find out if a product idea will succeed is to build it. Building a succession of low value features slows down the delivery of impact. There is a better way.

Every decision to build a feature comes with an opportunity cost: all the features and initiatives you didn’t pursue. Confirmation bias and recency bias can easily steer you toward the wrong choices, overshadowing opportunities with greater potential. That’s why research and rapid experimentation is critical to uncovering the best path forward.

Asking better questions to uncover innovation opportunities

The key to uncovering real opportunities is asking better questions in your customer conversations. Here’s how to approach it effectively:

Separate discovery from sales

When engaging in research conversations, avoid selling. These sessions are about learning, not pitching. Selling too early puts customers and prospects on guard and inhibits honest feedback. Create an open, collaborative environment where customers feel comfortable sharing their pain points and ideas.

Question design matters

It’s crucial to ask non-leading, open-ended questions. Avoid questions that suggest a specific answer, e.g. “Would this feature make your job easier”. Instead, ask neutral questions like “Can you walk me through how you currently handle this process:. Ask for specific examples, which help ground your insights in real-world behaviour. For instance, ask, “Can you describe a recent time when this issue came up and how you dealt with it?” Thoughtful question design uncovers genuine needs and avoids biasing responses.

Find out the facts

Dig deep into the specifics of the problem the customers are facing. Please will often say something is a “huge problem”, when actually it impacts them for 1 hour a month. Our emotional perception of a problem can be different from the material impact.

Problem size: How frequently does the issue occur, and how many users are impacted?
Impact: What happens when this problem is solved? Are their financial, emotional or operational improvements?
Reach: Is this a widespread issue affecting others in your target market, or a niche problem?

Remember, your customers are not product experts - that’s your role. Your job is to figure out their underlying needs and craft the best solution.

Analyse insights

Speak to 5-7 customers per topic and then pull all the responses together. Start by grouping similar feedback and identifying recurring themes or patterns. This will enable you to uncover the core problems or opportunities customers are expressing. Pay close attention to unexpected feedback, as it might reveal untapped opportunities or risks you hadn’t considered. Share these insights with the team to design some solution ideas.

Check strategic alignment

Once you’ve identified some promising opportunities, take a final step to ensure alignment with your overall strategy. Does the opportunity deliver results for your target market? Will it help differentiate your product and strengthen your market position? Now is the time to bring in your competitor analysis. Have you uncovered unmet needs your competitors are ignoring? If so, this could be a strategic advantage. Aligning customer insights with strategic priorities ensures you’re investing resources where they will deliver the greatest impact.

Use Riskiest Assumption Testing to reduce wasted effort

Once you have identified a promising opportunity, resist the urge to jump straight into development. The first solution often isn’t the best one and needs significant tweaking to work. Use Riskiest Assumption Testing (RAT) to refine your ideas before investing significant resources.

Steps to Test Assumptions:

Identify Your Riskiest Assumption

What must be true for your solution to succeed? How much hard evidence do you have that assumption is true? For example, will customers pay for this feature? How will they expect it to work?

Design a Low-Cost Experiment

Create prototypes, mockups, or landing pages to test your riskiest assumptions with customers or prospects. These don’t need to be perfect; they just need to generate useful feedback.

Iterate Based on Feedback

Use customer feedback from these tests to refine your solution. This iterative approach helps you iron out potential roadblocks to adoption before you’ve committed to expensive development work.

The Payoff of Better Customer Understanding

Investing in understanding your customers more deeply takes more time upfront, but that time pays off in the long run. You’ll make better decisions about what to build, spending less on wasted dev effort and delivering features that grow revenue.

So, the next time you’re tempted to prioritise a “faster horse,” pause and ask yourself: Is this a problem worth solving? Have I uncovered the real need? And is this the best way to address it? By combining customer insights with rapid experimentation, you can move beyond guesswork and build products that truly resonate with your audience.