Why Great Ideas Aren’t Enough to Build Great Products
Most manufacturers I work with never struggle with generating ideas. If anything, they have too many.
- Engineers see improvements they want to build.
- Sales brings features customers mentioned once in passing.
- Marketing wants something new to promote.
- Leadership adds their own list of opportunities.
On the surface, a full pipeline feels like a good thing. But when all the ideas come from inside the building, something important gets lost.
There’s no clear signal to tell which ideas will make the biggest impact for customers or move the business forward.
This is how teams fall into what I call the Build Trap. Not because they lack ideas, but because they’re lost in opinions, requests, and assumptions that aren’t grounded in real customer insight.
When teams stop spending time with customers, this is what usually happens:
- Priorities shift frequently.
- “Customer needs” become guesses.
- Products improve technically but stall commercially.
This isn’t a problem of ideas. It’s a symptom of working too far away from the customer.
Great ideas come from the intersection of customer insights, market opportunity, and business strategy. Without real feedback, it is almost impossible to know which ideas deserve investment.
The manufacturers who break out of this pattern do one thing consistently: They make customer insight part of their operating rhythm.
- Customer visits and conversations across roles
- Shadowing workflows to understand how people use the product
- Listening without rushing to solve
- Asking better questions to reveal unmet customer needs
Every time a team does this, something becomes clearer.
- A real pain point that is worth solving
- A gap no one saw internally
- A shift in priorities that is grounded in reality
And once you have clarity, ideas stop competing for attention. The best ones stand out on their own.
If you want help bringing more customer insights into your process, send me an email and tell me what you are seeing. I’m glad to talk it through and point you in the right direction.
