“What if we’re spending our time improving horses when, actually, we should be building a car?” my fiancée asked. She and her team were analyzing user challenges with their software to inform what the next version should look like. Her concern was that by focusing too much on people’s existing struggles, they might end up only fixing bugs instead of making better tools altogether.
There’s a quote often misattributed to Henry Ford floating around in product management: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” In my fiancée’s case, what good is making an annoying workflow slightly less annoying when, actually, you can remove the workflow altogether? What if the user could talk to an AI instead of digging through five tabs of code? Making the digging faster addresses only the symptoms, not the problem.
As we were sitting there, contemplating the famous analogy, I realized: “You know, maybe the people building the first cars weren’t thinking much about horses at all. Engine and automobile construction was an entirely new industry. They were probably just trying to innovate in their lane, making the best product they can. And, eventually, that product happened to make horse-drawn carriages obsolete.”
This one Henry Ford did address: “In a few years the horse will become obsolete except for saddle horses, though why anyone wants to ride horse back is more than I can understand,” he said in a 1923 newspaper interview. But out of the over 200 US car manufacturers from the early 20th century, how many thought the same? Who looked at horses in terms of features and benefits? “How could we increase galloping speed by 10%? Is there a way to get the same mileage with less food input?”
How we think about cars and what they can do evolved along with cars themselves. Whatever problems people did see with horses were not the exclusive source of everything the automobile would eventually come to offer.
There are many small problems we can think our way out of with A-to-B logic. But when it comes to real innovation, perhaps it’s best to pretend we’re back in our sandbox: Blissfully unaware, using whatever we can grab to build the coolest castle we can. Don’t think about the horses. Think about just how magical you want your car to be.
