# Your customers asked for longer cables. You built the wrong product.

One of the more useful stories from my conversation with Jason Moss starts with a complaint that sounds spectacularly uninteresting: the cables were too short.

Logitech customers wanted to connect a camera at one end of a meeting room to a speakerphone on the table. The sales feedback was consistent. Give us longer cables.

A perfectly reasonable request. Also a splendid opportunity to solve the wrong problem.

Jason went to see customers and asked what they were actually trying to achieve. One explained that the boardroom furniture cost more than the conferencing equipment. Having cables trailing across an expensive room was hardly the desired effect.

The requirement was a clean installation. Longer cables were the customer’s proposed workaround.

That distinction helped shape Logitech MeetUp: bring the camera, microphones and speaker together near the screen, simplify the installation, and let people look towards the people they were meeting.

The customer could describe the inconvenience. They were considerably less likely to design the next product category for you.

Jason and I worked together at Logitech, so this conversation involved a certain amount of shared history. It also exposed something businesses repeatedly get wrong: they confuse listening with obedience.

We tell product teams to listen to customers. Good advice. But a customer request usually comes wrapped in assumptions about how the existing system works.

If the speakerphone belongs on the table, the cable must reach the table. If the room needs dedicated conferencing hardware, the budget must accommodate dedicated conferencing hardware. Challenge either assumption and the possibilities change.

Jason’s career offers several versions of that lesson. At AMD, a manager put him on a major account team because he could connect with younger customer decision makers. Seniority alone was missing something.

At E Ink, commercial success required a publishing ecosystem alongside the display technology. A clever screen was insufficient if the content never arrived.

At QSC, he saw an opportunity to explain sophisticated spaces through their business impact. Calling a room expensive tells you its cost. Explaining what happens there tells you why somebody might pay for it.

He now sees another shift around connected building systems: lighting, building management, AV and IT contributing to a better view of how a physical space operates.

The pattern is useful. Look beyond the component everyone is discussing and examine the outcome people are struggling to achieve.

For anyone gathering customer feedback, I would suggest three questions. What are you trying to accomplish? Why is the present arrangement failing? What have you assumed cannot change?

The useful insight often arrives after the requested specification, when somebody finally asks why.

You may still end up selling a longer cable. Sometimes that really is the answer.

But you should establish that before investing six months in a beautifully engineered extension lead and congratulating yourselves on customer intimacy.

What is the most revealing difference you have seen between what a customer requested and what they actually needed?

Watch or listen to my conversation with Jason Moss on B4Obvious: https://b4obvious.com/interviews/jason-moss/.