The force multiplier most Product Builders skip
The most valuable career move I made wasn't an interview, a course, or a promotion. It was the months I spent on the ground with customers - before I ever called myself a Product Builder.
It was December 2018 and it had been 4 months chasing a hugely important customer to try our new add-on product that could guarantee offerings on the spot instead of a variable pricing product that could have a massive downside (think Wizz Air’s price lock).
Sounds like a no-brainer. But all these months, I couldn’t figure the reluctance - the investment was too small for the scale this customer operated at, there was only an upside possible, the trial was only for one of the geographies they operated in and it couldn’t possibly hurt him to make me happy (we were on good terms).
It was only in the months that ensued that their business lead revealed to me why a shift to this new product could signal an end to one of their largest vendors. He did not want that signal.
Every product builder I know has done customer interviews. Far fewer have done customer time.
There’s a difference, and it took me years to fully appreciate it.
Early in my career, I spent a meaningful chunk of time working with customers on the ground - not interviewing them, not surveying them, just being there while they did their work, made their decisions, and lived their day. At the time, it didn’t feel like a career investment. It felt like the job. To be honest, not the most glamorous one.
Looking back, it’s the best thing that happened to me early in my career.
Customer interviews are theatre. Customer time is real life.
A customer interview, even a great one, is an artificial environment. Two people meet for thirty minutes, agree to talk about a topic, and engage with the unspoken contract that something useful must emerge. The customer is performing, even if they don’t realize it. They’re rationalizing decisions they made weeks ago. They’re saying what they think you want to hear, or what they think makes them sound thoughtful. In my case, it was either them complaining about how poor our customer support was or how ahead of time our digital products were.
Field time is different. You’re with them when the decision actually happens. You catch the first thought - the unguarded one - that flashes across their face before the explanation kicks in or before they try to justify anything.
That first thought is almost always gold.
I had several similar instances where that first thought revealed even a lower price will not make the customer move even though the customer insights tools would mention Price as the biggest lever to get that customer.
Instead of crashing the whole market, I could then look at other ways to win the customer’s trust. In some cases, I eventually realised it wasn’t even the right customer for me to target!
The same thing when done in an interview? It’s been laundered into something more presentable.
You absorb the day-in-the-life genuinely
You don’t have to ask what their day looks like. You’re in it.
You see the interruptions. The workarounds. The tools they’re quietly cursing at. The colleague they route around. The metrics they actually care about - which are rarely the ones on the official dashboard.
This is the kind of texture you cannot extract through questions. You can only absorb it. It stays with you - in your subconscious mind. Pretty much forever.
You start thinking like them - without trying
The hardest part of building for someone else is silencing your own instincts long enough to hear theirs.
Field time does this automatically. Spend enough hours in someone’s environment and your reflexes start to shift. You begin to anticipate what will frustrate them, what will delight them, what they’ll completely ignore no matter how well you ship it.
This is the purest form of judgment there is. It can’t be taught in a deck or a Focus Group Discussion.
You meet variety, not a sample
Interviews give you a sample. The field gives you a population. You don’t pick five customers off a list. You bump into the loud ones, the quiet ones, the ones the sales team avoids, the ones who never respond to emails but have the sharpest opinions in the room.
The variance teaches you more than any one conversation.
You become a friend, not an interviewer
Customers tell you wildly different things when you’re a fixture in their world versus a stranger across a Zoom screen.
They share personal drivers - fear of looking bad in front of their boss, ambition for a promotion, frustration with a peer, exhaustion from a process that hasn’t worked for years. None of this surfaces in a structured interview, and most of it is what actually drives the buying decision.
Years later, I worked with excellent external research agencies. They ran rigorous studies, and the findings were genuinely good by any standard. But they never felt the same. The signal was thinner. The texture was missing. I was reading transcripts of moments instead of having been in them.
And even though there were valuable insights we could use to build products, it felt a lot less powerful. In fact, almost felt helpless and powerless going through the process.
Customer empathy is a portable skill
This is the part it took me the longest to realize: customer empathy transcends industries. It’s not really about your product or your sector. It’s about reading human psychology - how people decide, defer, rationalize, and act.
After all these years building products, I’m surprised how little serious emphasis there is on this. We treat customer understanding as a checklist (did we do five interviews this sprint?) rather than as a craft. We over-invest in outputs (think research reports, persona docs, journey maps) and under-invest in the actual skill of reading people.
The output is downstream of the instinct. If the instinct is weak, no amount of templating will save you.
The advice
If you’re early in your career and you want to build products that matter, get your hands dirty as soon as you possibly can.
It doesn’t have to be a full sales or business development role. A few weeks of genuine immersion can be enough if you’re paying attention. Ride along. Sit in. Shadow. Volunteer for the unglamorous customer-facing work that no one else wants. Especially in B2B, where the buyer’s reality is almost certainly nothing like yours.
If you’re building for consumers (B2C), you might be a user yourself which is both a gift and a trap. Your problem is not everyone’s problem. Your taste is not the market’s taste. The biggest mistake I see consumer founders make is quietly assuming that because they want something, others must too.
This is why “solve your own problem” is simultaneously some of the best and worst advice you’ll ever hear. It works only if you also do the work to understand how other people’s needs diverge from yours. Unfortunately, most people skip that part.
Start the clock now
Decks, frameworks, and interview templates will always be available. They’re commodities. What isn’t a commodity is the instinct you build by spending real time with the people you’re trying to serve.
Start that clock as early as you can. Compounded over a career, it’s the difference between building products that test well and building products people actually need.
If you’ve done time in the field - sales, support, success, frontline ops - I’d love to hear what stuck with you. Reply or drop a comment. The best stories about building always come from people who’ve been in the room.