What is more important - to be customer advocate or product advocate?

This point could be an interesting continuation of the point that Big Guys do not know everything just because they are big. Believe me, there are so many fundamental things that super mature players have very little idea about.
What should go first - chicken or egg? Classic question, right?
Yet we have an answer to it. 2 dudes in a garage!

On the first place, chicken is a product and egg is our customer. If we have a chicken, then we have customers…. what!?)
If we have a great product then we have a great number of customers, right? But what should we focus on - the product or customers?
That is exactly the point between effectiveness and efficiency, right?:)
These ideas are getting more and more beautiful the deeper we dig into them!
Interestingly, in order for us to get the answer we just have to use another dimension of thinking - and it is the concept of perspectives. Without short term and long term we just can’t solve the problem!

But with the concept of perspectives the problem is solved super easily!

In short term we have to be customer advocates so that we just give them whatever they need to make cash for our survival.
But in long term we have to be product advocates because by focusing on the great value we will end up having a great number of customers!
And not any other way.
If we focus on our customer in the long term, we will never be able to give them value they actually need, because they never really know what they want! We have to think on their behalf by ourselves, that’s why we should focus on building things and then test them, not asking customers and then build things. If you think about it, all great inventions came as a result of searching for some solution but not from a talk with the end user.
If we focus on our product in the short term, we are just simply lost, because it is simply not what people need. It is very unlikely for us to succeed in short time period with the customer needs.
That works everywhere with the question of cause and result.
That’s it, the problem has been solved only with a new dimension of thinking.

We should still believe in some innovations and test them. Once we see them not working, we should quickly kill them and move on. But we should still be convinced with some of them.
Spotify has been one of the biggest examples of that commitment to freemium model yet no big media company really believed in it, neither any other tech company. But Spotify was one of the first massive beneficiaries of Freemium models just because the co-founder, Daniel Ek, was persistent and had provided the customers with enough time to generate the demand as well as to test the model. It may not have worked out but that doesn’t matter any more. We we will never know whether freemium is the result of the right timing or some people’s persistence.