Bitch’n Ain’t Switch’n — Don’t Be Fooled By What Customers Say They Want

Building a product based upon “what customers want” can lead to ruin

Alan Klement

Published in

Jobs to be Done

5 min readNov 2, 2016

Your customers might be demanding changes. Listening to them could be your downfall.

Check out the Tweets below. Luke laments about users who demand changes. Bob says “bitch’n ain’t switch’n”.

What does Bob mean by “bitch’n ain’t switch’n”? The answer will help you avoid over-engineering your product, and keep your business from falling victim to creative destruction.

Study what customers do, not what they say

Just because customers say they’ll buy or use something, doesn’t mean they actually will. Behavioral economists call the former stated preference and the latter revealed preference. This is why within the JTBD community, we don’t say ‘create products that people want’. We say ‘create products that people will buy’.

There is much talk about the customer’s expectations. Meet the customer’s expectations. The fact is that the customer expects only what you and your competitors have led him to expect. Customer expectations? Nonsense. He takes what he gets. — Dr. Deming

A great example of stated versus revealed preference is Spirit Airlines. Customers have consistently rated it as the worst airline in the United States. At the same time, it continues to be the fastest growing and most profitable airline. If customers hate Spirit Airlines so much, why do they keep buying from it?

It’s a mistake to believe that customer satisfaction is the goal of innovation. It’s also a mistake to believe that customers know what they want — or that we should study customer “needs”. In fact, customers don’t know what they want or what they need.

A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
— Steve Jobs

So what do customers know? They do have an idea of how their life might be better when they have a product that helps them make progress. However, customers don’t know the best way to make that progress happen. That’s the innovators job. That’s what they pay us for!

Otherwise innovation wouldn’t be creative. It would simply be a process of sending a survey to customers, asking them what they want, and then making it.

How can people tell you what they want if they haven’t seen it before? If we ask them what they want, we’ll end up doing Swan Lake every year! — Mario D’Amico, senior VP of marketing at Cirque du Soleil

Here’s the thing. Just because customers complain, doesn’t mean they will stop buying from you. To the contrary, I’ve found that the customers who complain the most, are less likely to switch. Customers ask you to add features and make changes to the product because they like it, and want to get more out of it. They’re hoping you’ll give them more benefits, without having to pay more.

Besides, who takes the time to complain about a product they don’t plan on using? Think of Spirit Airlines. Customers hate it, but they keep using it.

Innovators study switch’n, not bitch’n

The customers who offer the best data about what changes you should make to your product are those who you never hear about. Why? Because (a) they never became your customer in the first place or (b) they left you long ago.

A dissatisfied customer does not complain; he just switches. — Dr. Deming

I learned this lesson the hard way while running FDT. My team continuously improved the product to suit the needs and wants expressed by our most demanding customers. However, the time and money spent on these changes didn’t result in increased profits. Why? They were loyal customers who were already buying the most we had to offer.

How did I fix this problem? I decided to focus on: (a) making changes that would get more people to start using our product; and (b) making changes that would prevent customers from switching from our product, to a competitor.

Do innovators only study switch’n?

I’m not suggesting that we only study switchers. Rather, I am making the point that studying what customers say they want is generally a bad idea.

Of course there are exceptions. Sometimes you’ll get suggestions from a particularly innovative customer. But those are rare. Another exception is when you’re facing a competitor who is working hard to defeat you. This is often the situation when dealing with “fast followers”. In that case, your innovation efforts need to be proactively defensive. What I mean by that is for another time.

The “only study switchers” mentality also doesn’t apply to creating new innovations. When I created Aim — a marketplace where real estate brokers and mortgage lenders share leads — I didn’t have any switchers to study. Instead, I talked with mortgage lenders about how they currently acquired leads. But even in that case, no mortgage lender ever told me they were unhappy. Not one of them told me to create an online ad network geared towards the mortgage industry. They just assumed that spending all day scrounging around for leads was ‘just the way things are’.

Become a better innovator

Innovation became a lot easier for me when I decided to focus on what customers do, instead of what they think they need or want. I believe this advice will help you as well. It will help you:

Avoid wasting time and money building features that don’t help you generate revenue.
Avoid building a product that customers say they want, but never buy.