Relying on customer interviews creates a false sense of understanding. The context gap between an interviewer and a customer living their job is too massive to bridge with questions alone. This leads to building products based on flawed, incomplete information.
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.
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.
When observing customers, distinguish between their literal minute-to-minute actions (their "Calendar") and their underlying goals or intentions (their "To-Do List"). Product opportunities exist in the frustrating gaps where actions don't efficiently fulfill intentions.
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 biggest opportunities often address needs that don't appear on a customer's "calendar" because no good solution exists. Products like Lovable for web design unlock latent demand by finally providing an accessible way to accomplish a goal that was previously too difficult.
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.
Before you have an idea, shadow professionals in different industries. The goal isn't product validation but finding a customer base you connect with. This ensures founder-market fit, a key to long-term motivation, as one founder did by choosing physical therapists over solar installers.
A product has strong market pull when it aligns with the customer's true goal (their "to-do list") far better than their current action (their "calendar"). Automated note-taking app JMP had pull because it perfectly matched financial advisors' hidden goal to minimize time spent on compliance paperwork.