Meyer: Be collective customer obsessed, never listen to feature design requests
David Meyer · David Meyer: Why You Should Hire People Who Aren’t In Product Already | E1076 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Nov 1, 2023 · at 8:04
David Meyer, SVP of Product at Databricks, discusses how product teams should navigate customer feedback without compromising product vision or over-indexing on individual customer demands.
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“People like to talk about being customer obsessed. But I think of there's the customer, and then there's the collective customer. So you have to be collective customer obsessed. So you never want to overfit to a customer because then it'll be a tiny town, right? So the customers, well, I never listened to them in terms of how the feature should work, but what they need to accomplish, you need, you know, suss out if that's a common need from your collective customer, because if you're serving one customer, if you're obsessing about one customer, but it's overfitting, you're screwing over the collective customer.”
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