Another fantastic piece from Eugene Wei on what he terms “invisible asymptotes” — the invisible barriers companies collide with in growth:

One way to identify your invisible asymptotes is to simply ask your customers. As I noted at the start of this piece, at Amazon we honed in on how shipping fees were a brake on our business by simply asking customers and non-customers.

Here’s where the oft-cited quote from Henry Ford is brought up as an objection: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses,” he is reputed to have said. Like most truisms in business, it is snappy and lossy all at once.

True, it’s often difficult for customers to articulate what they want. But what’s missed is that they’re often much better at pinpointing what they don’t want or like. What you should hear when customers say they want a faster horse is not the literal but instead that they find travel by horse to be too slow. The savvy product person can generalize that to the broader need of traveling more quickly, and that problem can be solved any number of ways that don’t involve cloning Secretariat or shooting their current horse up with steroids.

This isn’t a foolproof strategy. Sometimes customers lie about what they don’t like, and sometimes they can’t even articulate their discontent with any clarity, but if you match their feedback with good analysis of customer behavior data and even some well-designed tests, you can usually land on a more accurate picture of the actual problem to solve.

A popular sentiment in Silicon Valley is that B2C businesses are more difficult product challenges than B2B because products and services for the business customer can be specified merely by talking to the customer while the consumer market is inarticulate about its needs, per the Henry Ford quote. Again, that’s only partially true, and so many consumer companies I’ve been advising recently haven’t pushed enough yet on understanding or empathizing with the objections of its non-adopters.