Walking in their shoes—for real

The plates were annoyingly dirty. Just out of the dishwasher but not looking as sparkly and pretty as I expect them to be.

A small thing, of course, and hardly deserves kicking a fuss. But being my meticulous self, I took note and thought about how similar this is to product making.

I have loaded and unloaded this dishwasher hundreds of times since we moved to this house. If you put in the plates at random, they can get too tight and the water won't flow well in between, so you end up with dirty dishes. I notice things like that and after going through the exercise so many times I have figured out how to avoid this. On auto-pilot, I put the plates into one corner and pans in the other. And I remember to?keep cups to the left and bowls to the right because then I can fit in more.

It all might sound a bit nerdy, of course. But the fact is: I got a dirty plate that morning because my wife loaded the dishwasher the night before and not me. My wife is wonderful and hardworking but she hasn't dealt with the dishwasher enough times to know the difference.

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It is for this exact reason that you so often hear: ‘Product people should walk in their customers' shoes’. It means quite literally going on and doing their job for a while!

• If you're building an app for fitness instructors, try running a bootcamp in your local park.
• If you're optimising venue hire, volunteer to help parents organise birthday parties for their kids.
• If you're helping property investors, consider renting out your summer house on Airbnb to manage tenants and occupancy.

To develop a good product you need two things:

• knowledge of how to deploy software to improve business processes; and
• intimate understanding of the problems your customers face

It's worth stressing again: I'm talking about an intimate understanding of the problems. Nothing beats knowing how it feels. And nothing creates confidence like knowing that specific problems come up over and over again. Such patterns only reveal themselves after you've gone through the motion enough times.

Once you know what hurts, you can envisage what wouldn't and exactly why. Once you've seen something come up again and again, you'd be certain that any customer would eagerly invest in a solution.

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This isn't the only way to run product discovery, of course. It's just my dishwasher made it so easy to explain why this method is so effective.

If only you have an opportunity to get in their shoes for real, have no doubt: it will be worth it!

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Truly yours, Sergey Soloviov