Rushing to build what one customer asks for is a trap. Here’s how taking your time leads to better products and stronger demand.

Entrepreneurs and leaders love doing things quickly: Move fast and break things! Hurry up, the winner takes it all!

In daily life, it often pays off to know when to slow down. For more strategic activities such as product design or demand satisfaction, it’s the same thing. Speed is important, but speed can also hurt you.

While the pros of moving fast are widely discussed and glorified, the pros of taking your time aren’t. So let’s look into them in more detail.

Product Design

In my role as Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, I regularly talk to customers about their feedback on our product. Most customers request improvements to existing features, whereas most of them have very clear ideas of what those improvements should look like.

Should I run straight to our development team with each feature improvement requested by our customers? I don’t suggest doing so, for two reasons:

First, a rule of thumb states that your product roadmap should not contain more than 30% of direct customer requests, or you won’t have enough time to work on innovation and the next big thing. If you put too many of your customer requests forward for implementation, you might end up with the most polished piece of furniture on a sinking ship — an extra button here, a little automation there, but missing the next innovation cycle.

Second, always remember that you have more than one customer. If you improve a feature based on one customer’s feedback, you risk other customers not liking your “improvement”. Therefore, you need to discuss each feature improvement with multiple customers and then consolidate the feedback into an acceptable plan for the majority of your customers. If you’ve done that before, you will know that customers will ask you, “What took you so long?” when you release a feature improvement. Take it as a compliment and not a complaint — it means you did your homework before you started implementation.

Let’s look at product innovation now. Of course, artificial intelligence is the big thing everybody talks about right now. But do you think it’s easy to integrate AI into your product so that it adds value for your customers, and you can make money with it at the same time? I dare to say that many products have integrated AI without considering the costs of AI token consumption. Therefore, maybe it’s better to be late to the party, but first work out how to make money from this new technology.

Demand Satisfaction

Entrepreneurs love talking to people about their problems and what product would satisfy their demand. At the end, that’s the essence of entrepreneurship: Solve a customer problem and make money with it.

But take a moment to reflect before you jump on the bandwagon: Is there just a single person having that problem, or is there a market of many people with the same problem?

Before you start building a product, take the time to do some proper market research. Building a product to satisfy just one customer with one problem means building a castle in the air. Building a product that solves the same problem for many customers is the foundation for building a business.

Conclusion

Good things take time. In many cases, it pays off to think before you act, but this process will be surprisingly slow.

However, if you’re able to endure the tension between speed of execution and thinking time, this will be your ticket to finding out if there is a real demand for your solution, or if you’re just following a fad.