Guy Kawasaki Quotes

My job is to make sure that as our customers' priorities change, as the environment changes, we shift that portfolio of products to meet them.

We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.

The IT organization can't drive or lead a digital transformation. It has to come from the business and the business strategy, because they're fundamental to how a company or an organization evolves.

In our product development cycle, we ask and listen to our customer about what she wants.

Get your product into users' hands as quickly as possible and incorporate the crowd's feedback to iterate. Your customers will provide the data you need to chart the best course for your company and bury any competitor that goes it alone.

Always listen to your customers.

I'm a spreadsheet guy. But you get to that moment of truth, and it has nothing to do with a spreadsheet. You've got to factor in what your competitors are doing, what the technology is doing, what your shareholders want, what your employees want, what your customers want, and you've got to make it happen sometimes.

I'm not shy about asking the customer, because I want to talk about who she is and what she wants from me.

The Googly thing is to launch products early on Google Labs and then iterate, learning what the market wants - and making it great. The beauty of experimenting in this way is that you never get too far from what the market wants. The market pulls you back.

Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build - the thing customers want and will pay for - as quickly as possible.

We've found that customers are very open. They'll tell you what's going on, what's working and what's not. They're looking for help.

To succeed in business you need to be original, but you also need to understand what your customers want.

The secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want

When you find that it fails to respond adequately to your buying you don't need any better tip to sell.

The closer you get to your ultimate customer, the more you learn about your business.

The world is changing. We all know this. And as that world changes, if you don't transform your company, you're stuck.

The point is... you'd better figure out what your Customers - the Customers you want - value. Because that's what they'll buy. Anything else is a waste of their money, and they'll figure that out in a hurry.

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

Customers can't always tell you what they want, but they can always tell you what's wrong.

Thousands of salespeople are pounding the pavements today, tired, discouraged and underpaid. Why? Because they are always thinking only of what they want. They don't realize that neither you nor I want to buy anything. If we did, we would go out and buy it. But both of us are eternally interested in solving our problems. And if salespeople can show us how their services or merchandise will help us solve our problems, they won't need to sell us. We'll buy. And customers like to feel that they are buying - not being sold.

Our goal in making these changes is to enable Microsoft to achieve greater agility in managing the incredible growth ahead and executing our software-based services strategy.

When I look at efforts to create change in big companies over the past 10 years, I have to say that there's enough evidence of success to say that change is possible - and enough evidence of failure to say that it isn't likely. Both of those lessons are important.

Well, I kind of think that the opposite is true. The customer is rarely right. And that is why you must seize the control of the circumstance and dominate every last detail: to guarantee that they're going to have a far better time than they ever would have had if they tried to control it themselves.

Businesses want to think in terms of categories. Consumers want us to think in terms of their needs.

I always want to know whether the customers are satisfied; customer satisfaction is, after all, my ultimate goal!