We try to work backwards from the customer, rather than starting with an idea for a product and trying to bolt customers onto it.
Says Ian McAllister, an Amazon employee, who is responsible for managing product and business development for the online giant.
Think about it, how many times have you seen a company come up with a new idea, implement it and push the concept onto customers? This usually results in failure. In this quote from Quora below, Ian summarizes how Amazon uses their Press Releases as a tool for aligning their new product idea around the customers before starting development on it:
For new initiatives a product manager typically starts by writing an internal press release announcing the finished product. The target audience for the press release is the new/updated product's customers, which can be retail customers or internal users of a tool or technology. Internal press releases are centered around the customer problem, how current solutions (internal or external) fail, and how the new product will blow away existing solutions.
If the benefits listed don't sound very interesting or exciting to customers, then perhaps they're not (and shouldn't be built). Instead, the product manager should keep iterating on the press release until they've come up with benefits that actually sound like benefits. Iterating on a press release is a lot less expensive than iterating on the product itself (and quicker!).