Essay · Short read, about 800 words

Henry Ford, Innovation, and That Faster Horse Quote

Patrick Vlaskovits · Harvard Business Review Freemium Beginner

The faster horse line gets quoted to justify ignoring customers entirely, and that reading is wrong. Vlaskovits, a customer development author, unpacks why a customer asking for a faster horse is still handing you the real job (get me there quicker), even though they named a solution they could imagine. It reframes a feature request as a signal about intent, which is exactly the muscle this question is about. Read it as a way to think, not a rule.

  • People describe their needs in terms of the solutions they already know. The named feature is a proxy for a deeper job to be done.
  • Ignoring customers is not the lesson. Reading past their literal words to the underlying want is.
  • Your job is to separate the stated solution (faster horse) from the actual outcome they are chasing (get somewhere faster).
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The question it answers

  1. Customers say they want feature X, but is that the job or just a solution they've imagined?

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