Why User Feedback Isn’t Always the Answer

Listening to your users is essential. Doing exactly what they say is a different matter, and confusing the two has sunk more than a few good products. A product manager I worked with years ago had a philosophy she repeated so often it became a kind of team mantra. “The customer is always right.” She said it with genuine conviction. She built every roadmap meeting around the most recent batch of user feedback. She ran surveys constantly. She tracked feature requests in a massive spreadsheet and ranked them b