“Customers may not be able to articulate what they want, but they can’t hide what they need.” (http://www.cindyalvarez.com/learning/faq-customer-development-for-product-managers) And I’d argue that disruptive products benefit from customer input, b…

You're learning about your product, not about your customer. Now, concept testing is used in later phases of customer development, definitely.

And you can do the reverse as well – use concept testing as a jumping-off point to seek to understand the customer's needs. But unfortunately, many people show subconscious bias towards their solution, which blocks them from the “a-ha!” moments that lead to a really awesome feature/product breakthrough.

How is customer development different from concept testing?

Saeed

Enjoy your blog, glad you are bringing the user-centered perspective to a larger audience!

User research has typically not been a part of companies' arsenals until they're already pretty big (big enough to hire UX/IxD types). So it often ends up somewhat marginalized, instead of being a primary driver of business and product decisions.

Also the “who” – I used to be an interaction designer, and I used these exact same techniques. But the trend is towards these techniques moving more into the product manager or entrepreneurs' hands.

This is good for 2 reasons – by moving “upstream”, this research IS more likely to drive business/product decisions, and, by “hearing it straight from the horse's mouth”, it becomes harder for the product manager to ignore unpopular findings.

(I have seen, on many occasions, user researchers come back with findings that contradicted the product manager or executive sponsor's vision – and the response was to conveniently ignore the findings.)

Oh: and the other difference – a lot of user researcher folks have a more academic background, so they tend to be less comfortable with the small sample sizes, scrappy experimentation, and user deception (i.e. advertising a product that doesn't exist).