Henry Ford and the Fake Horses
A famous quote, which Henry Ford probably never actually uttered, goes:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
In most cases where I come across this quote, it is used as an argument against talking to customers and users. After all, the quote states that people who use products can only imagine incremental improvements. Only people with an outside perspective can develop truly new - disruptive - ideas.
For many, this means that you don’t need to talk to your customers. They can’t articulate what they want anyway.
The big misunderstanding of Henry Ford
For me, this is the great misunderstanding of Henry Ford. Because the statement refers solely to the level of customer wishes and ignores the underlying needs.
The quote lacks an important addition:
“When I asked my customers what they wanted, they said: ‘faster horses’. So I ventured to find out: ‘What for?”
We need to talk to our customers and users! However, we must not stop at the expressed wish and describe it as a requirement for our product (or freely ignore it according to Ford).
Instead, an articulated customer wish is the ideal trigger to follow up and move on from there to the needs of the person opposite.