On Listening To Customers

Over at Photoshop Insider, today's guest blogger - John Nack, the senior product manager for Adobe Photoshop - has a great post responding to Photoshop Insider's poll asking users what new features they'd like to see in the Photoshop product.

The post is a fascinating interesting inside look inside the innovation/product development process and the tradeoff between giving customers what they want as opposed to giving them tools they didn't even know they needed.

There are parallels here to book publishing as well, where there's a sense that it's the publisher's role to be a tastemaker for the consumer - to select and publish books in anticipation of interests readers might not be able to identify.

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