Uriah Heep wasn’t a very nice guy. (Opinions differ on whether Uriah Heep was a very nice band.) In Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Uriah Heep is the ambitious, greedy schemer who hides his ambition under a cloak of humility – as he famously says, he’s “very ‘umble”.
What has this got to do with companies developing new products? I’ll leave you to make up your own mind about ambitious and greedy, but humility is a key attribute for a company trying to match their product to a market that wants it. The discussion starts with a post by Marc Andreessen on Product/Market Fit, which Paul Buchheit then responded to. Rowan Simpson pulls these threads together and adds a little story about the humble origins of Gmail.
It’s another way of saying that the customer (or, in this case, the potential customer) is always right – despite some recent dissenters.
The application developer doesn’t know what the customer wants; the customer does. A feature may be brilliant, the product of hours of inspired coding, but if it doesn’t meet a customer need, then it’s useless. Conversely, a product doesn’t have to be perfect before it’s launched on the market. If it meets a need that wasn’t being met before, then it will be a success. If it doesn’t meet a need, it won’t.
The hard part is to figure out whether the product you’re working on meets a need before you spend a lot of money developing and launching it. That takes a lot of thought, a lot of talking, and most importantly, a lot of listening. And when you’re gripped by excitement, conviction and enthusiasm for a new product, it takes humility to put that to one side, and hear what your potential customers are telling you.
Tags: application development, customers, humility, product development, Uriah Heep