2023-07-11
The Henry Ford quote is so well known in product development that I don’t need to to quote it here.
“faster” wasn’t the selling point of cars over horses. Speed wasn’t the problem. Spending huge amounts of money, time, and space on keeping horses alive and dealing with the literal horse shit was the problem.
Those original problems are so far removed from modern day. It’s not intuitive to imagine the problems I’ve never had to solve. It’s intuitive to substitue my modern problem of speed over everything.
TL;DR: Henry Ford did not say “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. He pretty much said the exact opposite.
Listen to people. Get their point of view. Discover their problems.