While interviews yielded feature ideas, observing inspectors in the field ("ride-alongs") revealed the true bottleneck: hours spent writing reports at home. This insight allowed Spectora to ignore superficial requests and focus on the core workflow efficiency problem, which became their key marketing pillar.
Related Insights
Asking users for solutions yields incremental ideas like "faster horses." Instead, ask them to tell detailed stories about their workflow. This narrative approach uncovers the true context, pain points, and decision journeys that direct questions miss, leading to breakthrough insights about the actual problem to be solved.
Instead of inventing new features, Prepared identified its most lucrative expansion opportunity by seeing users' painful workarounds. They noticed 911 dispatchers manually copy-pasting foreign language texts into Google Translate—a clear signal of a high-value problem they could solve directly.
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.
A GSB receptionist's casual chats with alumni revealed the program's long-term "fine wine" value—a strategic insight that formal surveys often miss. This shows how empowering frontline employees to listen can uncover profound user truths.
Guillermo Rauch's product intuition comes from accumulating "exposure hours" to diverse products and, crucially, observing how people use his software in their natural environment. Seeing a user with a large monitor revealed a key UI flaw, sparking a major design improvement.
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.
It's not enough for platform PMs to interview their direct users (developers). To build truly enabling platforms, you must also gain wider context by sitting in on the developers' own customer interviews. This provides deep empathy for the entire value chain, leading to better platform decisions.
Standard questions like 'What's your biggest pain point?' often yield poor results. Reframing the question to what work a customer would offload to a new hire bypasses their pride or inability to articulate problems, revealing the tedious, high-value tasks ripe for automation.
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.