"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

This sentence, almost certainly apocryphal, is still one of the best provocations against a purely customer-driven view of product. I have seen it play out many times: we ask users about their frustrations, they hand back a very precise spec to optimise their current usage, and no one ever mentions the solution that would make their usage obsolete. That does not mean we should ignore users, quite the opposite. But we have to listen to what they say about the underlying problem, not only to the solution they imagine. In practice: when a client asks me for a specific feature, I systematically trace the chain back. Why this feature, what outcome do they expect, what is really blocking them. Most of the time the real request is not 'a faster horse' but 'getting there faster', and there is a better answer than the one they had imagined. I also find it interesting that this quote, even if false, has become a universal shortcut for disruptive innovation — that says a lot about how much people need to justify product decisions that contradict the voice of the user.