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There’s a lot of buzz in tech about how the user is a god, and how developers, designers, and product managers need to bow down to their every desire to provide solutions of value. I myself have documented numerous user stories, and have always tried to tune products/services in accordance with the audience. Best practice is: follow the user.

As an entrepreneur, product manager, and technology enthusiast, I’ve watched numerous companies struggle and even fail by strictly following user demands. I believe listening to your audience is important, but everything needs to be in moderation. For years I’ve followed the desire of the end user/customer, and offer a different perspective.

Don’t follow the user.

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Standard procedure: we look for a problem. Then we develop a solution. The users then find problems with our solution, so we build solutions to solve those problems. Then we poll the users, to see what they don’t like, want, and need, so we can tend to their desires because we value our users. This is how we sustain good business.

Now our efforts have become channeled, and our leaps in technology have become limited as our users only really know what they know. This virtuous circle can be destructive as an organization pours resources into serving a user while the student in the dorm room at Stanford is building technology leaps ahead of what the user demands.

Innovation based on data. Ninety percent of the world’s data was created in the last 2 years (that’s the saying buzzing around the valley). The number of data based start-ups have skyrocketed with easy access to data from nearly all devices. The largest topic at the 2016 Structure conference in San Francisco was the fact that we’re collecting so much data, we don’t even know how to store it all. Moore’s Law can’t keep up. Our decision making has been over run with analytics for smarter decision making. Where there used to be a balance of qualitative and quantitative decisions, we have been forced to be quantitative. All this is good as we’re able to understand our users better than ever. The missing piece is that we don’t reach ahead to the next level. We let the data decide for us, and at times, the critical thinking isn’t even necessary.

Stall of progress. The user doesn’t know what they want. Let’s look at Apple. With Steve at the helm, Apple produced block buster after block buster, each product making significant leaps in technology. Today, Apple has slowed innovation to a snail’s pace (Ben’s opinion folks. I am a fellow Apple user so don’t want to bash too much). The company has even gone backwards with a re-release of the previous iPhone 4. Why? Because their audience wanted the smaller phone. They only listened to the data.

If we had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. — Henry Ford

It’s really hard to design products based on focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. — Steve Jobs

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Our movies are even determined with data. Blizzard Entertainment launched their first film last year. They created numerous endings and showed them to a focus group. Cameras measured the facial emotions the audience had to each ending. The production team then analyzed the sentiment ratings, and selected the highest rated ending to the film. The technology is amazing and astounding! I’m actually a huge fan, but the concern I have is that as humans, we’re slowly losing our creative edge. We always look before we leap. Maybe we’d make more significant leaps if we didn’t look.

Is our progress in some industries slowing? Maybe… but it could be related to a number of factors. Including: Why are our leading engineers and scientists working on how to share baby photos with filters?! But that’s for another day. Let’s continue to keep our creative edge, Let’s use data as a tool but not a decision maker. Let’s listen to the user rather than follow them.