talk to customers? that's not the point
An average product person talks to customers to gather pain points and behaviours, then builds from that. The good ones treat pain and behaviour as raw materials to uncover the belief driving them.
The chain works like this: belief → behaviour → pain. Customers will tell you the pain and describe the behaviour. They won't tell you the belief. That's yours to reason and reconstruct.
Once you have a thesis on the current beliefs, you define what the new belief should be and build the product around it.
You ship it as an experiment. What you're watching for isn't usage, it's whether the pattern of usage matches the new beliefs you modeled.
Here's what the model looks like in practice:
| Airbnb | Dropbox | |
|---|---|---|
| Pain | Affordable stays feel unsafe | Can't access files away from the device |
| Behaviour | Couch surfing, Craigslist | Emailing files to themselves, USB drives |
| Belief | Affordable can't be trustworthy | File access requires the physical device |
| Product models | Affordable and trustworthy through reviews, verification, accountability | Files live everywhere, no device dependency |
| Behaviour change | Booking a stranger's home without vetting them externally | Saving once, accessing anywhere, no self-emailing |
| Belief updated | Affordable can be trustworthy | Files don't need to live on a device |