The toughest job for many project teams was to accurately predict consumer behavior. Time and time again, we learned that consumers would behave in ways we hadn’t imagined during the development phase—especially for brand-new features or products. Even the most rigorous models we used to predict consumer adoption could be well off the mark, leading to long, vigorous debates that never quite felt conclusive. (See, for example, our story of the Fire Phone in the introduction to part two. It’s not like we thought, “Here’s a dud, but we’re going to launch it anyway.” We had high expectations for
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Emphasizes the significance of gaining accurate customer signal. Painted-door experiments, direct customer feedback throughout product development, etc.
