What has this got to do with companies developing new products? I’ll leave you to make up your own mind about ambitious and greedy, but humility is a key attribute for a company trying to match their product to a market that wants it. The discussion starts with a post by Marc Andreessen on Product/Market Fit, which Paul Buchheit then responded to. Rowan Simpson pulls these threads together and adds a little story about the humble origins of Gmail.

It’s another way of saying that the customer (or, in this case, the potential customer) is always right – despite some recent dissenters.

The application developer doesn’t know what the customer wants; the customer does. A feature may be brilliant, the product of hours of inspired coding, but if it doesn’t meet a customer need, then it’s useless. Conversely, a product doesn’t have to be perfect before it’s launched on the market. If it meets a need that wasn’t being met before, then it will be a success. If it doesn’t meet a need, it won’t.

The hard part is to figure out whether the product you’re working on meets a need before you spend a lot of money developing and launching it. That takes a lot of thought, a lot of talking, and most importantly, a lot of listening. And when you’re gripped by excitement, conviction and enthusiasm for a new product, it takes humility to put that to one side, and hear what your potential customers are telling you.