I keep running into the same weird pattern.
Nearly every team I work with tells me they "know exactly what customers want." But when I ask when was the last time they talked to one, not for tech support or testing something out, there's this pause. And usually a guilty look. It might be weeks. Often, months. And a few times, it's been almost never.
And when I say knowing what customers want, I mean more than that. What these real humans want, need, their goals, their pains. When did we stop talking to the people who should be buying our services, experiences, and goods?
The drift happens gradually. You started with real customer insights (hopefully), then slowly replace them with support ticket summaries, competitor feature lists, and conference room assumptions. Maybe your company ponied up for some personas work/map — now you're asking 'What would Tatiana the team lead do?' instead of talking to actual Tatianas. Each slide/substitution feels reasonable.
But the real problem is that you’re having fewer and fewer conversations with actual human beings. And soon, you're building features based on pure guesswork. And that feels normal.
Note: the image at the top of this piece is from Giff Constable’s ‘Talking to Humans’ (www.talkingtohumans.com), illustrated by Tom-Fishburne.
Tired of building features nobody wants? Let's get your team talking to real customers again
_________ isn’t the problem
A while back, I worked with a healthcare staffing company that spent two hours every week onboarding new customers. Two hours. A week. Then another hour every six months for updates.
They’d come on for dashboard redesign work in a web app. General updates of existing patterns, needed to be responsive. When asked what was their biggest problem? They said, “Simple. We need a better dashboard. You know, better UX/UI design.”
But as we started talking to their customer support team, alarm bells went off left and right. And we were able to talk to two of their customers, it seemed more and more like the interface wasn’t the main culprit here. It was that they'd built out their entire staffing process in a way that made sense internally but very little to the people who had to use it. And completely backwards to their bosses who paid for it. So, companies were churning out, looking for other solutions. Or, with one, to make their own processes baked on top of existing tools.
And in some ways, this was obvious to most everyone on the team. But leadership had identified this other problem. Confidently to the point where no other opinions or input was possible. Proving, once again, that the most elegant solution to the wrong problem is still wrong.
A slide from one of the reporting decks for the healthcare staffing company, outlining the work that’d been done in eight (8) weeks by our team in the areas of experience design, business analysis, and technical architecture
Something else to consider
“The purpose of customer conversations isn't to ask people what they want — it's to learn how they work and what they struggle with.”
Most teams think customer interviews are about validation, asking, "Would you use this?" Or, "Do you like this feature?" Those questions get you polite lies and wishful thinking.
Fitzpatrick understands what matters: understanding how people currently work and what frustrates them in that process. It's the difference between asking someone to predict their future behavior versus describing their actual lived experience.
What I can't figure out
Why do some people become so confident about customer needs without actually having customer conversations? You don't need to talk to hundreds or thousands of people. According to most user research experts, talking to 5-15 people in qualitative research typically uncovers the same core insights as talking to 100s.
If you only talk to five (5), it’s better than none. And if you have a regular cadence and you talk to one weekly, over the course of three (3) months talking to a customer a week, you'll have 12 real data points instead of a bunch of assumptions.
I think there's something about being close to a product that creates false certainty. You know the features inside and out. You understand the intended user flow. You've thought through edge cases.
But your customers don't live in your head. There's a gap between your mental model and their reality.
And the fix is simpler than it may seem. Schedule five (5) customer conversations this month. Just five (5). Do one a week.
You'll be amazed what you learn when you stop guessing and start asking.
Until next time,
Skipper Chong Warson
Making product strategy and design work more human — and impactful
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