Do people know what they want, or should we create products that we want?

Mostly, people don't know what PRODUCTS or SERVICES they want, but they perfectly know what problems they want to resolve or what additional comfort they want to add to their life.

As a designer I want to say "create what you believe in". As a consumer I say "just solve my problem fast and cheap, I don't care what you believe in". Sadly, sometimes the winning products/services have nothing to do with any of the above and the one bigger marketing budget wins. It's all about the balance.

Is there any evidence that Henry Ford ever said that? I can't imagine the people would have said "faster horses". If we asked the question today, would people say "faster cars"? I don't think so. People would have described the problems with horses, e.g. the smell and mess they make in the street, the difficulty/expense in storing and feeding them when not in use, the safety aspects, etc. Just like today, we would talk about congestion, emissions and parking - rather than say we need faster cars. Mr Ford applied his expertise in engineering to create an innovative solution to all of the problems associated with horses in one go. My personal view is we should always ask customers about the challenges they are facing, because nobody understands those challenges better than they do. However, they are not experts in our fields and they won't hand us the solution on a plate. It's our role to apply our expertise to create an innovative solution to customers' problems, that customers would not have been able to think of themselves.

I once heard a quote from Rory Sutherland — Things that make sense don't always work and things that work don't always make sense. Highly recommend to read his book Alchemy, and I think you will get an answer to your question really fast :)

From what I've been studying, people don't know WHAT they want. They know what they want SOLVED. People didn't know they wanted can openers until they had to open a can

Creating things that are useful to me personally are what usually work out. Because if it solves a problem I have, chances are it solves other peoples problems too.

We are part of the people. The more we are in resonance and groove with everybody, the more we make good products for the people by making them for ourselves.

Focus on their problems rather than the products they want, or that you want to build. Once you have confidence that there is a pervasive problem that a sizeable market is willing to pay to solve, the. Doing offer testing is straightforward to determine if your idea would solve their problem at a price they would pay.

This reminded me of the Steve Jobs quote - "People don't know what they want until you show it to them". So why not create products that we want and solve a problem that people did not even know existed?

There's no right or wrong answer but to me, it's a bit of both. Did anyone know they wanted to get into strangers cars for rides? no. But they definitely did want on-demand ride services. It's really a constant cycle of making assumptions and testing it. Rather than focusing on what people want, I think it's more identifying a problem that people have (the more the better). Find a way to reach people that want that problem solved. Build a solution for that problem. Then focus on what they want :) Just my .02.