IndieHackers -style ? 😉

Haha, Im actually not familiar with them :thinking_face:

You may want to check it out. Great community for makers: https://www.indiehackers.com/

It's possible but quite damn difficult but as with almost anything, you can improve at it (learning to ask the right questions, learning to probe the right rabbit holes, etc) I'm currently working with an engineer/product manager who can do this quite well. It:s pretty inspiring to watch/observe

Yeah it’s a skill I don’t have/don’t have the inclination for. I can brief/probe the people talking to customers, I’m just not that skilled at it myself

Right, yea, some people are definitely better than others

There's a potential pitfall in being closed off from the 'product' seat and that is: You potentially end up developing features, etc that no one will actually use

I am one degree away from the people actually talking to customers. They have far more patience than I do

On the other hand, it means I can better contextualise a problem when I’m not directly talking to customers. A customer might be panicking “oh I can’t do this it’s the end of the world”, but stepping back makes it easier to figure out a workaround/solution without implementing everything the customer says they want

Because from experience, what they say they want is probably not what they actually need

> They have far more patience than I do Lol

> but stepping back makes it easier to figure out a workaround/solution without implementing everything the customer says they want > Because from experience, what they say they want is probably not what they actually need Well, how do you figure this out without talking "deeply" with customers about the problems they want solved?

Not quite what I'm meaning. More that if you're talking to the customers it's easy to get wrapped up emotionally in what they're after. Having someone there who can logically smooth that out afterwards works wonders

Or at least, gives a better view on what they need to go back and ask the customer about further to dig deeper

We've had a few incidents of getting emotionally mixed and developing things we really didn't need to, when something simpler/completely different was actually what was needed

And only really finding out later when the customer asking for it still wasn't happy

So... you still have someone having proper conversations with clients, but having the extra impassionate layer to question has done wonders

Oh right. Well, someone has to do the "emotion-filtering" process then, right?