I was on my flight home listening to a podcast as Christina Wodtke put it plainly: "Product people should sit in on user research and participate in it as much as possible. Even though you'd rather just read the report and it's slow and boring, what you're doing is you're taking care of your brain. You watch it and you'll hear what they say."
It took me back to a user research session I sat in as a product lead at Prime. One participant turned to another to say: "yeah, you know, it's like sometimes I'm on orange Prime, and I don't even think about blue Prime." Orange Prime meant free shipping; blue Prime meant Prime Video.
That naming was a new one to me, but it expressed in the voice of the customer exactly what we'd been discussing internally for a while: despite Prime being one subscription, one brand, to customers it was sometimes perceived as two products, told apart by color. None of the internal or commissioned research had mentioned it.
A branding consistency project was already underway, so that session did not start anything. But it did remind me why it mattered, and in the words customers actually use.
Not that Christina pigeon-holed it in this way, but I think this applies beyond the realm of product managers, especially as everyone becomes a builder. If you're reading this, you could ship something real this week. So the expensive mistake is to go 100 km/h in the wrong direction, building the thing beautifully for a user you've never actually listened to.
Yes, build. But build for them.