The question isn’t really “should you listen to your customers?”. It’s more “Should you listen to your customers for possible problems/desires to attempt to solve…. or should you listen to them for solutions?”

The former will always be fruitful while the latter will only sometimes be of benefit… and often it’ll be a detriment since it’s more likely to be influenced by the closed-mindedness of the existing solutions already available. Or to not take the bigger picture into context.

I encounter this a lot in essentially the same way, albeit a different context, when working with my (IT) consulting clients. They have a particular technical problem and often when I’m called in they already have a solution in mind, which may not be particularly effective at addressing the real underlying culprit, and the’ll ask me to implement it. I’ll often get everybody to step back, forget about the prematurely proposed solution, go back to reconsidering the true pains/desires, consider things in the context of higher level business requirements, and only then do we prescribe a solution.

Thus:

1) Listen to your prospective target market, existing customers, etc. to find out their problems, pains, needs, and desires. Recognize when they are trying to suggest solutions rather than problems. Take solution suggestions with a grain of salt.

2) Come up with a good solution to one or more of these problems/desires.

3) Consider getting some inspiration from the solutions suggested by customers but be careful not to get locked down in traditional thinking..

Keep perspective like this is easy to miss but critical to innovation and break through thinking.

-jr