You can almost always tell the difference between a PM who has deeply felt the customer's pain vs one who understands it only abstractly.

Both may know the requirements, the stats, and they may even say the same right things, but over time I've realized the quality of their judgment diverges.

The PM who spends real time with customers tends to: notice sharp edges earlier, push for simpler experiences, develop stronger intuition for what actually matters (and prioritize accordingly), and feel urgency around problems that otherwise look “acceptable” on a dashboard.

In the AI era especially there’s a growing temptation to outsource customer understanding to dashboards, synthesized feedback, research summaries, intermediaries, even AI itself.

These tools are incredibly valuable and I use them constantly, but they're still downstream of direct exposure.

There’s no real substitute for hearing the pain when a customer describes their struggle with a workflow that might've felt obvious to you - be it via real customer interactions or even just reading the raw verbatim feedback they share.

Dogfooding goes a long way too. Try to replicate real customer scenarios with all their complexity and edge cases, not just demo flows or tutorial-level scenarios.

Yes this doesn't scale perfectly, but only aggregated feedback doesn't build real intuition. Some of the best product leaders I know are deep in the trenches with customers, and they actively dogfood. That’s not a coincidence.

If you ever have to choose between scale and proximity, choose proximity.