As companies grow, communication becomes fragmented across more people, increasing the risk of "translation errors." Regular, firsthand customer experience for all roles—not just founders—is essential to prevent internal models from diverging from customer reality.
Related Insights
Even at significant scale, Alex Bouaziz maintains a deeply hands-on approach, believing it's a critical cultural pillar. Being involved in day-to-day problems and customer issues prevents him from being too far removed from the business. This proximity allows him to identify flaws in org design, response times, and processes that are invisible from a '10,000-foot view'.
Embed engineers directly with customers to hear feedback and ship solutions, often on the same day. This radical structure eliminates layers of communication (Product Managers, Customer Success) and scales the 'founder energy' of talking to users and immediately building what they need.
Customers describe an idealized version of their world in interviews. To understand their true problems and workflows, you must be physically present. This uncovers the crucial gap between their perception and day-to-day reality.
True product intuition isn't just from standard discovery calls. It's forged by directly engaging with customers' most urgent problems on escalation calls. This unfiltered feedback provides conviction and data-backed confidence for decision-making.
Brainstorming cannot reveal the true friction in your customer experience. Following JetBlue's example, leaders must regularly become their own customers. This practice uncovers how high-level decisions inadvertently create flaws in the customer journey that are invisible from the boardroom.
Most engineers only interact with customers during negative events like outages or escalations. To build customer empathy and a product mindset, leaders must intentionally create positive touchpoints. This includes sending engineers to customer conferences or including them on low-stakes customer calls.
When everyone on the team shares the same deep understanding of the customer's world, communication can be imperfect. The shared context fills in the gaps, preventing the "translation errors" that plague teams trying to operate from detailed specs alone.
The only reliable way to understand a customer is to "forward deploy"—work alongside them in their actual environment. This direct experience of their job closes the context gap that interviews can't bridge, revealing unspoken needs and frustrations.
To truly understand a B2B customer's pain, interviews are not enough. The best founders immerse themselves completely by 'going native'—taking a temporary job at a target company to experience their problems firsthand. This uncovers authentic needs that surface-level research misses.
As Drift grew to thousands of customers and hundreds of employees, Elias Torres found his time consumed by managing people, not talking to customers. He intimately felt the pain of losing that direct connection, realizing that by the time a CSM flags a churn risk, it's often too late. This pain directly inspired his next company.
