LinkedIn·Friday, 31 July 2026·26d ago

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Some claim Henry Ford said that, and it's usually quoted as a…

Anna Balabina

Co-founder & CFO of casepal

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Some claim Henry Ford said that, and it's usually quoted as a case for ignoring customer feedback. Build the thing you believe in, tune out the noise, disrupt away. I think that is so wrong. Because it misses the core point. Customers wanting faster horses weren't wrong about what they wanted: getting from point A to point B faster, more reliably, with less effort. A faster horse was just the vocabulary they had for that need, the only reference point available to them. The job was never to take the request literally, or to dismiss it either. The goal was to hear what it was actually pointing at. This summer, I am having more conversations than ever with lawyers, builders, founders, in-house teams, and firms across the world, as we shape our big next for legal. Discovery like this takes a lot of time, reflection, and brainstorming, but is so essential before building. Of course, things that matter rarely come from someone asking for a feature by name. They come from seeing the pain point as clearly as possible. So this summer we are looking not at the faster horse, but the reason someone wanted to go faster in the first place. P.S. For mysterious reasons, I have no photos with horses. But found one from the Spanish Riding School from my visit to our clients in Vienna!