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.
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Even roles far from the customer, like engineering, make countless micro-decisions. Without an intuitive understanding of customer pull—what they're trying to achieve and why they're blocked—these decisions will likely miss the mark, even when just following a requirements document.
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.
Product managers who feel "too busy" to provide context are making a false economy. A simple five-minute explanation or Loom video clarifying the "why" behind a task can prevent an engineer from spending a week or more building the wrong thing, offering a massive return on investment.
The key skill for using AI isn't just prompting, but "context engineering": framing a problem with enough context to be solvable. Shopify's CEO found that mastering this skill made him a better communicator with his team, revealing how much is left unsaid in typical instructions.
Co-founder conflict often arises when one founder (e.g., go-to-market) has deep customer exposure while the other (e.g., technical) operates on secondhand information. This "context gap" leads to strategic misalignment and frustration, causing teams to split.
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.
The true power of UX research is aligning the entire product team with a common understanding of the user. This shared language prevents working at cross-purposes and building a disjointed product that users can feel.
Technical tools are secondary to building a successful design system. The primary barrier is a lack of shared vision. Success requires designers to think about engineering constraints and engineers to understand UX intent, creating an empathetic, symbiotic relationship that underpins the entire system.
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 bridge cultural and departmental divides, the product team initiated a process of constantly sharing and, crucially, explaining granular user data. This moved conversations away from opinions and localized goals toward a shared, data-informed understanding of the core problems, making it easier to agree on solutions.
