December, 2009
The general consensus is that listening to your users and customers is a good thing and with the abundance of social networking it has never been easier to receive immediate feedback. (Think the outcry that happens every time Facebook update’s their user interface - which is all the more entertaining since people generally use Facebook to complain about Facebook)
We are now living in an age where everyone has a platform to share their opinion. In fact, whether you have solicited it or not, and whether you are listening or not, customers are sharing their feedback. Some of that feedback might help you build a better product. Some of it might make your product worse. None of it will drive innovation. Yet the sparks of innovation are often hidden in the back story of criticism.
There is a balance between using feedback to build a great product and ignoring feedback to build a great product.
