What your customers want.

I recently got to take a break for a couple of days with my family driving through Idaho, Montana and Wyoming...essentially circling up through Island Park, down through Yellowstone and into Jackson Hole. We saw incredible sights and had a lot of fun like fishing in the woods. But at the end of the day, what my kids really wanted in a vacation was simply a swimming pool and a hotel room where they could watch the Disney Channel. I now realize I could've saved some time and money and just driven to the local Marriott.

Today I had a call with a product manager from a multi-billion dollar software company. He was letting me in on a sneak peak of their next release of some software which will be launching soon. He was very excited to show me all of the work his development team had done. And, certainly, they had done a tremendous amount of it. He even said that they had do develop a new technology for these added features.

The problem is they didn't listen to the customer.

They are only implementing half of what we really need. Had they taken the time to talk with customers before development they would've had a much better product.

I'm guilty of this same oversight -- as my kids let me know when they hit the pool in Jackson Hole. But this has opened my eyes to making sure I do my due dilligence before development. And you should too.