An hour with a customer beats a week of technical onboarding meetings.
It’s a working principle I’ve learned the hard way. At first, I trusted the engineers. But over time, it became obvious: they were building to spec, not to scenario. They were blind to how people actually used what we built.
And it showed.
Internal Confidence, External Friction
Don’t run on assumptions. Tech leads trust UX flows. Product managers trust dashboards. Everyone trusts each other’s instincts. But no one’s talking to the user.
Internal feedback isn’t useless. It’s just insulated. It smooths edges. It misses the rough.
I Trusted the Spec. Then I Took a Call…
The dashboard was blank. The client couldn’t use the feature we’d just pitched as “core.” His setup? Totally different from what our team had modelled.
He wasn’t lost. We were.
That call flipped a switch. Everything I thought I understood about our product—from onboarding flows to feature adoption—was second-hand.
So I stopped relying on second-hand.
I joined support calls. The ugly ones. Where clients were angry, blocked, or walking away. And that’s when it became obvious: we weren’t building the wrong features. We were building them in a vacuum.
From Anecdote to Insight
Once you step outside the internal echo chamber, a different product story emerges:
- Clients weren’t confused—they were constrained.
- Features weren’t underused—they were overengineered.
- Demos weren’t failing—they were missing context.
We rebuilt the GTM stack using the words customers used, not the ones marketing invented.
Customer friction, it turns out, is a strategy input—not just a bug queue.
How I Advise External Input Standard Practice
Here’s what I suggest:
- Schedule client calls before roadmap reviews, not after.
- Note every sales objection.
- Train account managers to capture one insight per call, no exceptions.
Kill internal-only retrospectives. If it didn’t involve the user, it didn’t happen.
Engineers don’t see the workaround. PMs don’t feel the context. Sales hears the objections—but rarely joins the planning.
Customers live all three.
If you’re not speaking with them directly and regularly, you’re not learning. You’re guessing.
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